In the recently ended Aman season, 5.73 million hectares were cultivated nationwide, and combine harvesters cut the rice on 642,000 hectares, or 11.22 percent of the total. This saved farmers about Tk 549.21 crore in harvesting costs and prevented the loss of 218,000 tonnes of grain worth about Tk 570.20 crore. In all, combine harvesters saved farmers about Tk 1,119.41 crore across Bangladesh in the transplanted Aman season.

The figures come from the Department of Agricultural Extension's (DAE) "Agricultural Mechanisation through Integrated Management" project.

Project director Tariq Mahmudul Islam said cutting, threshing and winnowing one acre by hand costs Tk 11,800, while a combine harvester does it for only Tk 6,000 including all costs, a saving of Tk 5,800 an acre. Post-harvest losses with the machine are only 2 to 3 percent, against 10 to 12 percent with traditional methods.

Amid a global economic downturn, he said, there is no alternative to modernising and mechanising agriculture to ensure food security. Under the project, 12 categories of machines are distributed with a 70 percent subsidy in haor and coastal areas and 50 percent on the plains: combine harvesters, reapers and reaper binders, rice transplanters, seeders or bed planters, power threshers, maize shellers, power sprayers, power weeders, dryers, potato diggers and potato chip-making machines. So far 25,165 machines, including 7,256 combine harvesters, have been distributed with subsidies, and they are changing farming and farmers' lives.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.