Appropriate mechanisation in Bangladesh for sustainable smallholders’ arable crop farming: From local adoption to scaling up

Project Active from to Sustainable Growth, Firm capabilities and Trade

This project focuses on the mechanisation of arable crop farming in Bangladesh, considering the extent to which autonomous machines can guide smart farming transitions.

Bangladesh’s arable crop farming is struggling to mechanise in response to high labour costs, labour scarcity, and the demand for climate change-induced intensive crop management. A question of central importance is whether to adopt two-wheel machines (2WM) or four-wheel machines (4WM). On the one hand, 2WM requires too much labour; on the other hand, 4WM is the most efficient in large, rectangular fields. Reorganising the Bangladesh agricultural landscape into larger rectangular fields would be socially, economically, and environmentally disruptive. Consequently, retrofitting existing 2WM for autonomy has been suggested as a low-cost and sustainable option. 

To help guide Bangladesh’s crop and mechanisation alternatives, the objectives of the study will be to (i) assess the economics of conventional human-operated 2WM and 4WM, and (ii) evaluate whether low-cost retrofitted 2WM could be the long-run sustainable solution.

The pilot study will focus on Rajshahi district (Agro Ecological Zone, AEZ-26), a high Barind Tract water-stressed area that has been confronting on-farm resource constraints.