Mechanisation problems in the small-scale farms in Turkey

Abstract

Within the last 45 years, governments in Turkey, displayed a great concern in introducing enough modern technology into agriculture. Among the other technologies, agricultural mechanisms is generally the most visible and easily recognised of technological changes observed in the rural areas of Turkey agriculture is that, agricultural holdings mainly consists of considerably small-scale ones. These structural characteristics create difficulties in application of technologies, in specific agricultural mechanisation. There are about 4 million farms in Turkey 68% of farm holdings has a size smaller that 5 ha. Over 90% of the farms and over 60% of total land fell into the 0-20 ha size group. The farm structure is very fragmented and this respect Turkish agriculture resembles poor development part of the EU countries. In Turkey the average farm size was 5.7 ha. When we compared with the some EU member countries according to the number of the tractors in EU which it was 71 as the Union average. It was recognised the same deficiency in the number of the tractor's equipment as parallel with the tractors number. When the situation was evaluated efficiency of the tractor and subsidiary equipment use point of view, it reveals an over mechanisation problems due to the dominance of small-scale farm structure. As a solution in short-run, partnership in tractors and other machines use and group farming could be advised especially in the regions where extensive and small-scale farming are dominated.