Technology Generally Used in Agriculture

Q. List the technology generally used in rural non-firm and farming activities in Bangladesh?

Bangladesh is a developing country with limited resource. Rural areas contain larger part of the country and there are both farming and non-farming sectors. These sectors are contributing in the country’s GDP. The farming sectors include- agriculture, livestock, fisheries and forestry. The rural non-farm sector includes activity excluding farm activities.

Technology in non-farm activities:

Non-farm activities can be classified into three categories:

• Mostly manual labor based (self-employed subsistence- oriented cottage industries, wage employment in rural business enterprises, transport operation, and construction labor).
• Human capital based occupations (salaried service in public and private organizations, teachers and imams, village doctors, and various types of personal services).
• Physical and human capital intensive activities. (Commercial type rural industries, including agro -processing, shop-keeping, peddling, petty trading, medium and large scale trading, and contractor services).

And the major characteristics of rural non-farm activities are:

• Rely and create more on rural services and consumers.
• Traditional in terms of technology vintage.
• Homestead based and labor intensive.
• Depends on the use of family labor.

In rural non-farming activities generally the people used relatively simple and conventional technologies and now a day some small scale machineries are using for different purposes.

Technology in farm activities:

Rural farming activities in Bangladesh generally use both the traditional technologies and the farm machineries. The indigenous farming technologies are used in agriculture, fishing, and livestock farming. And the farming machineries used in agricultural production for the land preparation, Irrigation, threshing of paddy and wheat, husking and milling, storing of the farming production. Now in Bangladesh most of the farmers use machine power for land preparation of different kinds of crops, irrigation mainly depends on the power pumps. From field level to production, preservation to sells and marketing different ways and use of some technology for these steps in Bangladesh are given below:

• Land preparation (Bullock draw plough, power tiller, Four wheel tractor)
• Seed preparation (Manual)
• Sowing, planting & transplanting (Land broadcasting method, Manually operated seed- fertilizer district, Planter)
• Intercultural operation (line sowing)
• Spraying (sprayer)
• Threshing / shelling (Land beating & bullock trading, Pedal operating thresher, power operated thresher, power seller)
• Win owner (Land, pedal & power operated win owner)
• Drying (Sun drying, Mechanical dryer)
• Storage (Traditional bamboo structure, Modern Cold storage)
• Milling (Engle berg milling, husking mill)
• Testing & certifying
• Processing & marketing

These are the technologies uses in Bangladesh for farming and non-farming activities. Generally both traditional and modern technologies are used here.