Drudgery Reduction by Adoption of New Practices

Abstract

Most of the agricultural-tasks are involved with considerable drudgery. So, it is preferable to utilize more developed tools in agriculture. In this study, an evaluation was made on the drudgery-levels of farmers during harvesting of paddy in Odisha (India) in two cases, such as use of serrated-sickles for manually harvesting, and use of power tiller reaper. A reduction of 26.61% in drudgery-level was observed based on the measured ergonomic-parameters by power tiller reaper as compared to serrated-sickles. Further, correlation-coefficient matrix was obtained by considering the ergonomic-parameters for both the cases. Moreover, an attempt was made for the evaluation of adoption practices of the farmers by the use of “Adoption and Diffusion Outcome Prediction Tool (ADOPT)” to provide the prediction of an expected rate of practices as well as peak level of adoption by determining the significance of diverse factors that influence it. Then, the SWOT analysis was done for the power tiller reaper, which was followed by the opinions of farmers in to assess the suitability of both cases.