III. Read and translate the text (Прочитать и перевести текст)

III. Read and translate the text (Прочитать и перевести текст)

GENERAL CHARACTERISTIC OF AGRICULTURAL MECHANIZATION

The efficiency of farm production is one of the economic problems associated with agriculture that many countries still face nowadays. Some other economic problems are intensification and specialization of agricultural production, labour productivity, farm planning and management, prices for farm products, their marketing and others. Simple logic makes it evident that the first three issues are closely connected with farm mechanization and automation of agricultural operations.

In Canada, in many of the East and the extreme West states conditions are not unlike those in Great Britain, but the prairie farms are entirely different and represent, with the adjacent Great Planes area of the United States, one of the most extreme examples of mechanization that can be found in the world. Here, as in some Southern Russia's steppe lands, the simple alteration of cereal cropping and fallow leads to a very inexpensive form of mechanization This factor, supplemented by adequate farm human resources and up-to-date agricultural know-how, makes farming production costs reasonably low and, thus, more profitable.

New Zealand farms contrive to achieve a high output per man by making the best use of their pasture and climate, and generally providing each worker with as much equipment as he can handle for doing time-consuming chores such as milking. There is only one worker to about 155 acres (60 ha) of farmland. Extensive use is made of advanced techniques, e.g. aerial top-dressing, in order to improve the production from areas that are difficult or impossible to deal with by tractor power. Several of the countries of Eastern Europe and the USA are of particular interest from the viewpoint of mechanization, on account of their efforts which have been undertaken to employ nationally planned policies, through a system of very spacious state, business-owned and/or private farms.

Such policies clearly permit rapid introduction of large-scale high-power machinery, and that directly leads to agriculture's intensification and labour productivity. Further increase in animal productivity is achieved both by the introduction of new machinery and by wider automation of various processes on livestock farms in the industrialized countries. Many farms are using now automatic waterers which provide water to livestock at all times; at the press of the button, silage unloaders remove the food stuffs from the silo and drop it into the conveyer that carries the silage to the feed troughs.

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