I would like to strongly endorse S. Justice's comments concering the importance of mechanization to promoting smallholder agriculture, the emphasis on contract access vs. direct ownership, and the main stream development effort tendency to overlook the importance of mechanization.
I think the development efforts overlooking mechanization is related to the short comings of agronmy, which is my profession. Agronomy working mostly on small plot research does an excellent job of determining the potential of an area, but says nothing about the operational needs to extend the small plot results across the remainder of the field, farm or smallholder community. The default assumption is that it is not a problem, and only requires extension education for interested farmers to adopt the technology. There is little analysis of labor requirements, or more important the availability of the needed labor, or the rational compromises farmers have to make in adjusting technology to thier limited labor and operational capacity. This falls into an administrative void between the agronomists and social scientists. Who in any given agricultural development project is assigned to sort out labor requirements, where the labor will come from for the entire smallholder community, and what the compromises are when not available.
Unfortunately labor is in severe short supply as well as the dietary energy to fuel that labor, leaving most of the development effort ineffective as the lack of labor will extend the basic crop establishment out to 8 weeks or more well past the period when recommendations are valid. Please consider the following webpages:
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/promoting-the-green-…;
https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/OperationalFe…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/calorie-energy-balan…
Thank you
Dr. Dick Tinsley