i-Khet Punjab

Punjab Remote Sensing Centre

About this app

Rural people depend heavily upon agriculture either as farmers, casual labourers, workers in agro-based industries, traders in agricultural produce or as hire service providers. One of the principal causes of poverty among smallholder farmers is the lack of farm power (labour saving tools and equipment, animal and mechanized power) and importantly access to it. Farm power embraces all forms of power inputs in agriculture and the commercialization of its products, ranging from human inputs, animal traction, engine driven technologies, together with associated tools and implements .

Lack of availability and access to farm power by small farmers is a key factor that leads to a decline in production and consequently farm output and environmental issues. Timeliness of farming operations can also have a critical effect on crop yields. Delays in planting after the optimal date can amount to yield penalties of up to one percent per day of delay. Hire services, be they rental, custom or leasing services, can commonly be found in many countries and concern production, harvest, post-harvest and marketing operations. The most popular hire services encountered are those devoted to: Land preparation, Planting, Spraying, Threshing, Shelling , Crop residue management, Transportation etc.

In rural areas of many developing countries, consumers of hire services are typically smallholder farmers within village communities cultivating less than one hectare of land. Providers of hire services in this context are primarily farmers themselves who have invested in equipment, both for their own use and because they have identified a potential for hiring services to their local markets. In more sophisticated settings with more rigorous demands and better rewards, specialised service providers commonly emerge. Realistically the option that many small-scale farmers have is hiring power services from neighbours or service providers. Hiring the power service spreads the cost and brings the engine powered operation into the realms of financial possibility for many small-scale farmers.

Custom Hiring envisages promoting establishment of farm machinery banks for hiring by way of providing financial assistance to self-help groups or farmers’ co-operatives since the prohibitive cost of hi-tech and high productive equipment renders it difficult for individual ownership that offer farm equipment and machineries on rental basis to farmers who cannot afford to purchase high end agricultural machineries and equipment.
With continued reduction in average farm size, individual ownership of agricultural machinery will be progressively uneconomical. The challenge to policy makers will then involve the task of not only leveraging farm mechanization for enhancing agricultural productivity, but also how to include large community of small and marginal farmers into the fold of mechanized farming. The only answer to this is the custom hiring of agricultural machinery by farmers for farmers, which can promote mechanization of agricultural operation on small farms.

Recent developments in GIS technologies have the potential to provide better solutions to enhance information level to strengthen the decision making. It was desired that mobile and web based application should be developed, where farmers may book the required farm machinery through online system (Mobile based) and service provider may provide services on a single platform where end to end reporting and action taken for each farm machinery may be visualize on the web.