An overview on agricultural engineering technologies for potato farming in Nepal

Potato is a major food and cash crop in Nepal, with strong potential to enhance food security, livelihoods, and economic growth. However, its labor-intensive nature, rising production costs, and persistent labor shortages highlight the urgent need for agricultural engineering interventions. This paper presents an overview of agricultural engineering technologies for potato production in Nepal, focusing on the current production landscape, available technologies, major constraints, and strategies for promoting sustainable mechanization. Over the past decade, Nepal has made notable progress in agricultural mechanization, particularly in tillage, irrigation, and spraying, through the adoption of powered pumps, sprayers, tractors, and mini-tillers. Despite these advances, key potato farming tasks like planting, weeding, pest control, harvesting, and post-harvest handling remain mostly manual. Although some mechanized planting and harvesting have been introduced in the Terai region, using tractor-mounted equipment, the overall adoption of specialized potato machinery remains minimal. The limited uptake of mechanization is attributed to factors including difficult terrain, small landholdings, low investment capacity, limited repair services, traditional practices, and a lack of gender-sensitive and agroecology-specific tools. To address these barriers, future efforts should prioritize the development and deployment of lightweight, hill-compatible tools, and agroecology-based machinery. Promising options include row and picker wheel-type potato planters, seedbed formers, ridgers, inter-row cultivators, fertilizer spreaders, power weeders and sprayers, micro-irrigation systems (drip and sprinkler), low-cost diggers, and efficient post-harvest technologies for grading and processing. Moreover, the adoption and integration of smart farming technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and controlled environment systems (e.g., hydroponics/aeroponics) in potato farming are recommended as key future research directions in Nepal.