ABSTRACT
Difficulties encountered in the introduction of new techniques in developing agriculture have led to a special study of traditional farming systems and have initiated a need for a proposal for a full set of technical solutions ranging from production machinery to the processing of products - even their sale.
The need for co-ordination and for finance for research and development has shown that bilateral relationships between researchers have to be extended to a network, as in Africa through ACEMA (Euro-African Association of Agricultural Engineering Centres). Although a very wide range of research seems to be undertaken by European and African Centres, in the main it tends to be directed towards
– reducing the cost of agricultural practices (animal-drawn implements requiring lower tractive force pull-strength, stripper harvesting of rice, low-cost threshers)
– fitting the size of equipment to the size of farms (one-row stripper, low-powered tractor, processing of cassava at village level)
– covering the extra costs of mechanisation by high added value of new types of food for urban markets (that is, new processing, such as osmotic dehydration of fruit and vegetables)
– developing measuring devices adapted to machines in normal field operations, for testing their suitability (on-field research)
– studying upstream bottlenecks (feeding of the animals, new sources of energy from biomass)
– and downstream ones (stabilising, drying, conditioning, packaging of products).
This can be seen in some of what CEEMAT does.