REASONS FOR SLOW ADOPTION OF MECHANICAL TRANSPLANTING OF RICE IN PUNJAB

The study was conducted in two districts of Punjab, namely Sheikhupura and Okara, representing core and non-core rice sowing areas, to find out the reasons for the slow adoption of Mechanical Transplanters. A total of 84 farmers, 64 farmers (equivalent to 76.19%) from Sheikhupura district, and 20 farmers (equivalent to 23.80%) from Okara, were interviewed. The interviewed farmers were small (16.67%), medium (21.43%) and large (61.90%) farmers respectively. Amongst the interviewed farmers, 78.75% were adopters, whereas the remaining 21.42% were non-adopters. Amongst the adopters, 72.7% were large farmers having an average area of more than 25 acres, followed by small (18.2%) and medium farmers (9.1%). Amongst adopters, 54.5% were owner cum tenants followed by owners (39.4%) and remaining 6.1% as tenants meaning that Mechanical Transplanting is he technology for large farmers whether they are owners or owner cum tenants. Almost 88% of the MTR adopters had their tractors, whereas 94% had their tube wells as a source of irrigation, meaning resourceful farmers were adopting this technology. There is a significant difference in 1000 grain weight of different varieties falling in the category of fine, coarse and hybrid varieties but in field no distinction is being kept by the service providers as they are using on an average 10kg seed (100 trays per acre/100 gm seed per tray) for all varieties. Five most common reasons of slow adoption of mechanical transplanters by rice growers are i) lack of expertise on the part of machine operators (95.2%) ii) high mortality rate of seedlings (92.9%) iii) high seed rate in mechanical transplanting (85.7%) iv) non-availability of mechanical transplanters in the area (85.7%) v) Mechanical transplanting is not suitable for small holder farming. Almost 61% of the adopters reported increased yields with Mechanical Transplanting as compared to manual transplanting of rice.