Published in Scientific Papers. Series "Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and rural development", Vol. 17 ISSUE 1
Written by Paul Osu SIMEON, Hemen Emmanuel JIJINGI, D.I. ADAMU

The farming population in the rural areas of Nigeria is in continuous decline due to ageing and the rural-urban migration of the youth in search of education and modernity for a presumably better life style. The governments at national, states and local government areas levels have ill-conceived and ill-operated many agricultural mechanization schemes/programmes extended only to arable crops production and complete exclusion of livestock production, though with the right intentions of mitigating the effects of the scare of drudgery associated with tillage, cereal grains threshing, etc and also for the expansion of production in agriculture. The scare of hard labour is not helped by absence of modern amenities in the rural areas. The “skeletal” appellation is due to the schemes’ great limitation to very narrow aspect of farm mechanization and coincidentally, this study has been limited to South of Taraba State which lies within the Guinea Savannah geographical area of Nigeria. The method adopted is use of structured questionnaire administered by paid agricultural extension agents who were able to have good interactions with the farmers and governments’ machinery service centres (Tractor Hire Units) operators/managers. Descriptive analysis was adopted for the discussion. The outcome reveals a negligible impact of less than 6 % admitted by only 4.6 % of the respondents; and great dissatisfaction among farmers, greed and incompetence among operators as well as bad technical quality plus inappropriate and incomplete machines and implements provided by the governments. This paper highlights points missed by government as well as the areas of abuses due to corrupt tendencies and usual Nigerian factor. The paper ends with call on the government to change the ways the programmes are pursued so as to improve on the situation in view of the food supply and climate change threats to humanity and its possessions.

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