Research Information System
Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment, vol.9, no.2, pp.245-249, 2011 (SCI-Expanded)
The mechanization of agricultural production processes represents one of the means to increase agricultural productivity. Knowledge of the mechanization level of a region or country requires to have a certain base of comparison. This level is always tend to change according to changes of farmers income and climatic conditions as well as social changes. In this regard, changing status of agricultural mechanization level during Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) process was investigated from the years of beginning the implementation of GAP, an integrated regional development project, in the Southeastern Anatolia region which holds 10% as regards to land and population of Turkey. For this purpose, comparisons were made between the calculated values of agricultural mechanization level in the region with that of Turkey's values between the years of 1991-2007. At the end of the evaluation, a significant increases were found in terms of the number of tractor, average tractor power, tractor power per unit area and the number of tractor per unit area compared to that of Turkey general beginning from the years of start of GAP. Despite this facts, the indication values of agricultural machinery (0.63 kW/ha, 16 tractor/1000 ha, 62.6 ha/tractor and 6.7 equipment/tractor) were found to be at the level of very much below from the average of Turkey's values (1.51 kW/ha, 42.4 tractor/1000 ha, 23.6 ha/tractor and 7.6 equipment/tractor).