Assessment of Farm Machinery Utilization Level and its Determinants among Private and Government Organization of Southern Regional State of Ethiopia

Farm machinery utilization improves the quality of field operations. The objectives of study were to describe mechanization status and assess determinant of farming machineries utilization level among private and government organizations in Southern Ethiopia. Purposive and snowball sampling technique was employed to select target area and respondent. Structured questionnaire, focused group discussions, literature review and field observations were used to produce the necessary data. A total of 126 participants were selected from research center, seed producing union, private sector and institution. The results showed that 97, 96, 94, and 92% challenges were high price, transmission problem, and poor maintenance of farm machinery and lack of skilled operators found constraints affect utilization of farm machinery. About 77% was no access to farm machinery spare parts. In SNNPRS, 82%, 6% and 6% of power sources for land preparation were farm machinery, animal and human, respectively. Furthermore, sowing 67%, weeding, 90%, spraying 74%, harvesting 70%, winnowing 55% and sorting 61% were performed by manpower. Logistic regressions revealed that five variables significantly influenced the decision of the enterprise to utilize farm machinery are number of farm machinery, farm size, number of operators, access to training and access to maintenance service. Generally, farm machinery maintenance center, low level skilled operators, high price of farm machinery, lack of genuine spare parts, unavailability of sufficient credit and dollar exchange were great challenges for seed enterprises in southern Ethiopia. Hence, government should provide spare parts, maintenance service center, training, a long-term loan and tax relief for importer.