Scaling agricultural mechanization services in smallholder farming systems: Case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America

Farm machinery use and maize yields in China: an analysis accounting for selection bias and heterogeneity

“…Farm machinery has long been playing an important role in enhancing land productivity and promoting sustainable agricultural practices such as conservation agriculture and intensive production practices (Benin, 2015;Sims et al 2016;Qiao 2017;Adu-Baffour et al 2019;Takeshima et al 2020;Van Loon et al 2020). Farm machinery enables to substitute manual labour and traditional tools such as draft animals and hand holes, and it has the potential to save production costs and reduce drudgery.…”

“…Mechanisation is regarded as a motor for agricultural transformation. Most of farm operations in developed countries are accomplished by farm machinery, while farm machinery in other parts such as in sub-Saharan African, Latin America and South Asia is almost negligible given total cultivated land area (Van den Berg et al 2007;Baudron et al 2015;Adekunle et al 2016;Aryal et al 2019;Müller 2020;Paudel et al 2020;Van Loon et al 2020). For example, the proportion of farmland cultivated by tractors in Africa south of the Sahara is only 10 per cent, compared to 35 per cent in South Asia and 50 per cent in Latin America (Benin 2015).…”

“…Benin 2015;Ma et al 2018;Paudel et al 2019;Justice and Biggs 2020;Takeshima et al 2020;Van Loon et al 2020).…”

Sustainable intensification of African agriculture: a necessity, but not yet a reality

“…State-led efforts in several African countries to mechanize agriculture mostly failed, due to their governance models, lack of proper use and maintenance, and the type of equipment selected [12] . Recent interest in mechanization for the region is building on lessons from the success of scale-appropriate mechanization in Asia [13] . Alternate cropping practices that feature reduced tillage require smaller, less powerful, more affordable tractorsincluding two-wheel tractorsand are suited for small farms [14] .…”

A Low-Cost Platform for Modeling and Controlling the Yaw Dynamics of an Agricultural Tractor to Gain Autonomy

“…[8] describes the development of a novel wheel robotic in the production process utilizing solar panels to execute monitoring tasks. Actually, there is an increasing interest in autonomous vehicle systems considering kinematic and dynamic behavior [9]; such interest also extends agricultural vehicles in different labors in agribusiness [10][11][12][13][14].…”