Capital Use among Farmer Households: A Study of Cotton Belt of Rural Punjab

The present paper analysed the ownership and utilisation of farm machinery in agriculture.The tractor contributed the highest value of `146665, followed by the electric tubewell (`72865), trolley (`26933), and combine (`21058).The ownership of capital assets and the size of farm holdings had a positive association.Around 70 per cent of the farmer households had owned tractors.Only 18.11 per cent of the tractor owners used tractors for commercial purposes.In contrast, the proportion was 23.26 per cent for the rotavator, 95.83 per cent for the reaper and 100.00 per cent for the combine harvester.The tractor was utilised for 352 hours only over the year by all the sampled farmer households, which was much below the minimum 1000 hours of productive use in agriculture.Rotavator was utilised for personal farming by the medium and large farmer households, and the small and semi-medium farmer households made commercial use of it.However, reaper and combine were owned for commercial purposes by the farmer households.