Farm mechanization to create new jobs

WITH the signing into law of the Agriculture and Fisheries Mechanization Act (AfMech) or Republic Act 10601 in June this year, the Philippines can expect farmers to become more interested in mechanizing their operations, which is expected to increase farm productivity in the next few years.

However, as more Filipinos mechanize their farms, it is expected that some agricultural workers will lose their jobs as machines will perform tasks that were once performed by humans. In fact, the proliferation of rice milling machines has made it unnecessary to hire workers who used to do the milling of palay (unmilled rice) manually. However, the upside is milling recovery from palay using machines is now 60 percent to 65 percent, compared to about 50 percent using the manual method.