Unless supported by agricultural mechanization, achieving sustainable development goals is generally challenging in sub-Saharan African countries, specifically so in Ethiopia. Animal power is the dominant mode for plowing, threshing, and transportation in Ethiopia and yet, at the same time little effort was employed to assess subsistence farmer’s tractor demand in the study area. This study was conducted to understand the preferences of wheat producer subsistence farmers for agricultural tractors in Ethiopia in 2017. A random sample of 79 households participated in either rental or purchase choice experiments. The descriptive statistics revealed that 42% of respondents chose to buy tractors, and 43% preferred to use rental services. The random parameter logit estimation result showed that plowing-and-transporting tractors were preferred by the farmers who participated in the purchase design. They are also willing to pay ETB 149,142 (USD 6516) for transporting-only tractors, ETB 218,253 (USD 9536) for plowing-only tractors, and ETB 367,957 (USD 16,077) for plowing-and-transport-only tractors. However, due to the exclusion of high wheat producers in the rent experiment, the current rental price was found to be far from the 99% confidence interval of the estimated price. The government should promote and encourage the appropriate use of agricultural tractors that are affordable for subsistence farmers through rental or purchase. Conservative agriculture should also be practiced as the over-use of tractors may disrupt biodiversity and natural biological process.

Sectoral economic growth data in Ethiopia show that the agriculture sector has the lowest growth, which is caused by frequent drought and inefficient technologies, among other factors. As a result, the productivities of land and labor, as well as the income of small-scale farm households, are very low, and rural areas have a relatively high poverty rate. A quasi-experiment was applied to understand the impact of using small-scale irrigation motor pumps on farmers’ livelihood improvement. Specifically, a survey was conducted in 2019 on a sample of 92 small-scale irrigation motor pump and canal irrigation users as the treatment and control groups. The weighted propensity score matching method was applied to eliminate initial differences and adjust sampling proportions across the groups. Based on the average treatment effect on the treated estimation results, we cannot state that the mean income difference in small-scale irrigation motor pump users and canal irrigation system users is different from zero. This indicates that countries with little capital to invest in large-scale irrigation projects can introduce household-level small-scale irrigation motor pumps to improve farmers’ incomes.

Rural livelihood in Ethiopia is dependent on subsistence agriculture that has been challenged by farmland shrinkage as a result of rapid population growth. The Amhara regional state government has implemented egalitarian farmland redistribution in 1997 in the region for small-scale and landless farmers. This study aimed to seek new insights from the perspective of equity, rather than efficiency such as agricultural investment and productivity which other previous studies have focused on, and quantitatively evaluated the effect of the land redistribution on the size of farmland holdings of subsistence farmers. Large-scale repeated cross-sectional national statistics, the Ethiopian Agricultural Sample Survey (AgSS) from 1995 to 1999 were used as the data of this analysis. The difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation was applied to evaluate how the land redistribution affected farmers' farmland holdings. The results showed that farmland holding size per farmer in the Amhara Region has significantly decreased after the land redistribution, therefore, this policy achieved certain results from the egalitarian perspective since national land endowments were redistributed from large-scale farmers to small-scale and landless farmers. However, this study focused on only the short-term effect of the land redistribution and more studies are needed to clarify the long-term effect.