Modern Farming Techniques in Tanzania

Farming and farm equipment has changed dramatically from the early days in Tanzania. At that time, agriculture consisted of clearing the land of trees and brush, tilling the land with a plough, and planting a single crop repeatedly until the land was depleted. Once the land was unfertile and botched to produce a crop, the agro-pioneers just pulled up stakes and moved west to the next land piece. Even as the country rapidly expanded, west farming continued to evolve. As crop farming developed, harvesting farm equipment and machinery also evolved.

The introduction of the combine harvester and mechanization practices was a major leap forward in this technology. The combine was a self-propelled machine that generally cut and threshed grain in one step. This machine increased grain production radically. Like a third-world country, Tanzania has a long way to go before it becomes self-sustainable and can boost its exports to a great extent.  Farm machinery has taken huge leaps forward in Tanzania and other African countries. The industrial revolution has changed farming beyond recognition and transformed man-power to machine-power. Now farms work with a range of machines, but time-tested technologies’ like tractors, harvesters, and irrigation systems remain the most widely used machine on Tanzanian farms. Combine harvesters from various brands such as Kubota have taken one job away from tractors; however, tractors still do the vast majority of work on modern farms due to their versatility. Due to the variety of implements and attachments, tractors lend themselves to a huge variety of tasks on any farm and are an extremely valuable tool for farmers.

The smallholder agriculture farmers and intermediaries can reap the full-advantages of modern-farming methodologies, and rural farmers can adapt quickly to the innovative mechanization and modernized farming techniques seamlessly. The aims of modern agricultural methods are two; one is to have a very high yield of the farm produce. Second, it is to get a good profit out of the farm products.  To achieve these, adequate input to the farm is very important. The bottom line is that innovation is the key factor in modern-agriculture, and Tanzania is slowly transforming into a completely modernized agriculture country and has a long path to cover. The industry as a whole is facing enormous challenges, from rising costs of supplies, a shortage of labor, and changes in consumer preferences for transparency and sustainability. There is increasing recognition from agriculture corporations that solutions are needed for these challenges.