Assessment of farmers’ perception on rice reaper in the haor region of Bangladesh

Abstract

This study was conducted to assess and identify the problems of handling reaper and their effects on the farmers’ adoption in the haor region of Kishore- ganj and Brahmanbaria district through personal interviews with a well- structured questionnaire and focus group discussion. Six different character- istics were selected namely, age, level of education, annual family income, farm size, access to information sources, and extent of machine used to study the adoption of reaper by 44 selected farmers. Results of statistical analysis with SPSS software indicated that education, access to information sources, and extent of different machinery use played a very significant role in the adoption of the reaper. It was found that the higher secondary educated re- spondents scored 11.43, the high extent of media contact respondents scored 14.57 and the medium extent of machinery users scored 8.65 in the case of measuring the satisfaction level within the range of −18 to +18. Based on data from the selected farmers, the result revealed that 82% of them were satisfied. This study also identified some constraints of reaper operation that were obtained from the respondents like slipping and skidding problems on muddy soil, problems in cutting over inclined crops, problems in cutting over flooded crops, problems in cutting over matured crops, etc. Some sug- gestions were made by the respondents for further improvement of reaper like wheel bit should be more ridge or iron wheel or plastic wheel should be used to overcome the slipping or skidding problem, a binding mechanism should be attached to save both time and labor.