Agriculture production system in Kenya depends on among other sources of power human labour and motorized power.
While motorized power makes 30 percent of the power source, human labour leads at at least 50 percent.
As such, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) has come up with a solution to mitigate the problem of mechanization.
This is by introducing Shujaa, a 10.5 HP tractor developed to help small scale farmers work efficiently.
Here is the story as told by WoK.
In 2017, JKUAT developed Shujaa tractor to help small scale farmers work within the cost limits and increase agricultural productivity.
The tractor can be used in all farming activities within the small scale set up including ploughing, harrowing, spraying and transportation.
According to Livingstone Mulamu, an engineer and researcher based in JKUAT explained that the idea to come up with the Shujaa tractor came from India.
To localize the idea, JKUAT partnered with an Indian institution USAID India.
“The institution from India brought us some innovation that we were to test under adaptive research and give a report on whether we can adapt the way they are or we can do our own research and come up with our own,” Mulamu said.
In the course of the research, Mulamu noted that they engaged farmers in a bid to identify some of tr major challenges.
After an intensive research they realized that a lot of farmers had difficulties with among others timely land preparations.
Farmers with lands between one to five acres were not able to do land preparations in time due to poor methods of land preparation.
“Some of them were using oxens. An oxen kind of land preparation will take you 2-4 days an acre depending on the condition of soil
“For such, you have to feed the operators, animals and pay them about Ksh 4,500 per acre excluding Ksh 1,000 that you’d have spent on feeding them,” he explained.
Mulama explained that compared the oxen and the ridiculous cost of labour that comes with it, a Shujaa tractor will only need six liters of fuel to plough one acre.
“After seeing that, we realized that we needed to go further and improve further on smallholder mechanization,” he said.
The operator of the tractor must be a person of sound mind with an age of over 18 years and trained, and must be licensed by the relevant authority.
