تقييم الاستثمار فى الألات الزراعية غير التقليدية والذاتية الحركة فى ظل ادارة القطاع الحكومى والخاص المصرى

The socio-economic assessment and appraisal of the performance of mechanical harvester, Combine-Harvester and Seedling-Machine, depended upon sample survey and questionnaire forms applied for the three common types of enterprises of such machines in Egypt: private, State and Specialized Ideal Units of the Research Institute of Agricultural Engineering. The financial statements analysis showed that the Seedling-Machine achieves the lowest return to investment (19.4%), while the Combine Harvester achieves the highest return to investment (52.4%), and the Reaper achieves an internal rate of return of 29.4%. While the private enterprises show the highest return to investment, the state firms are of the lowest return to investment. The critical level of operating hours per machine that achieves the average discount rate in Egyptian market (20%) is 257 hours for the private enterprise, 604 hours for the specialized ideal unit and 753 for the state enterprise. These differences are due to the structure of the operating costs and the rent-out rate under the three management types. The average profit per operating hours of the Combine-Harvester is about L.E. 39 for the private enterprise, L.E. 37 for the state enter¬prise and L.E. 33.5 for the specialized ideal unit. The average profit per operating hour of the reaper amounts to L.E. 7.6 for the private enterprise, L.E. 6.9 for the specialized ideal Unit. The Seed¬ling-Machine achieves a loss of L.E. L9 per operating hour due to low demand for it, because the farmers believe that it is not a proper technology for the Egyptian rice farms. Impacts of phasing-out the energy price subsidy on the machines profitability vary according to the machine capacity (horse power), level of maintenance, which affects its fuel consumption rate, which in turn varies among the different enterprise types. However, the fuel consumption and the costs of energy are of the highest level under state management. The of of a reaper achieves a level of income amounts to L.E. 1764 per capita per year, assuming a family size of 5 persons, which is 88% of the average per capita income. The investment in a Combine-Harvester, achieves an average per capita income of L.E. 5000, i.e. 2.5 times the national average. Generalization of the Combine-Harvester to cover all wheat area's harvesting, threshing, winnowing and backing, would release about 159,000 opportunities of agricultural labor from wheat farms, which would be under employed, if and only if, an integrated rural development program has not been established soon. The supporting industries that may associate with the generalization of the Combine-Harvester operation on all wheat area in Egypt would create, only, 23,000 new labor opportunities.