Mechanization in Hot Pepper Production

Recently, a couple large local hot pepper farmers and farmer groups have made significant strides by procuring equipment to mechanize the planting and maintenance of their crops. Climatic conditions are becoming harder and harder to predict. This has a significant impact on pepper farmers because they need a stretch of consecutive dry days to prepare their land, install their plastic and irrigation and to plant their seedlings. If done manually, an acre can take weeks depending on labour availability and the entire process can be upended and caused to have to start over from scratch if their is heaving rainfall during the process. It is therefore incumbent on farmers to complete the land prep and planting process as quickly as is possible before the rain comes.

Mechanization is a good way to achieve this in that it cuts the time to plant significantly. Farmers would have already been accustomed to using tractor, ripper, harrow, disk plough to prepare the soil. More recently farmers have now been exposed to single machines that can simultaneously make the bed, drop pre plant fertilizer on the bed, install the drip irrigation, lay the plastic on tip of it. There is another machine that simultaneously punches the hole in the plastic and allows the operator to drop the seedling into the hole.

The improvement in efficiency is massive and good justification for the investment. The above-mentioned equipment, including tractor, disk plough, ripper and boom spray is approx USD115,000 the savings on labour cost coupled with yield and efficiency improvement provide a payback of just a few years,

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