Filipino farmers will soon get big help from Yanmar, an iconic Japanese firm with over 100-year stellar record in manufacturing quality agricultural equipment, as the company prepares to its grand launch in the Philippines.
Set for tomorrow at the Sofitel Hotel, Yanmar Philippines is excited to enter the Philippine agricultural market to help assist Filipino farmers who are estimated to be half of the country’s 42 million labor force.
"It is our share in modernizing the Philippine agriculture,” said Cristy Rose Eltagon, advertising head of Ropali Group of Companies, the partner of Yanmar Japan in launching Yanmar Philippines.
Ropali Group of Companies is a major shareholder in Yanmar Philippines.
Yanmar’s entry to the Philippines can be considered a great blessing as it will boost farmers’ capability to cultivate their lands without the old, slow and unreliable carabaos, now viewed as symbols of the country’s backwardness in agriculture arena.
According to the firm, the Philippines is currently the world’s eighth biggest producer of rice. With the help of the agricultural machinery it builds, Yanmar believes it can help increase the scale of food production in the country in the future.
Continued economic growth and a greater demand for agricultural machinery make the Philippines an important market for Yanmar.
It has also carried out thorough research relating to the Philippines’ agricultural industry and society.
Yanmar partnered up with Ropali Corp. for the establishment of a joint venture which was registered in February 2015.
Ropali Corp., on the other hand, is involved in industries in the Philippines ranging from the financial industry to the sale of agricultural machinery.
Yanmar also intends to utilize its long heritage in technical innovation to provide agricultural solutions in the Philippines that go well beyond customer expectations.
No less than the Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS) reported that thousands of hectares of lands in Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Quezon, Masbate, Ilocos Norte and Laguna are underutilized due to absence of advance and high tech agricultural equipment.
Even Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala has been urging farmers to invest in high-tech, advance farm equipment to increase their yields, saying any farmer can get a return of investment in less than two years for a P200,000 he spent in buying a tractor.
A study released by the Department of Agriculture said a smallest tractor can have the workload of four carabaos in just five hours.
The only additional expenses are the diesel and the fee for the operator.
Yanmar Philippines’ mother company in Japan, Yanmar Co. Ltd., is a very respected name in agricultural equipment production, having able to build machinery that can be used from plain land cultivation to aerial spraying.
The engines are used in a wide range of applications, including seagoing vessels, construction equipment, agricultural equipment and generator sets.
Within the last 20 years, Yanmar has also established a growing presence in the domestic UAV market in Japan and elsewhere, with small helicopter UAVs such as the Yanmar YH300 SL and Yanmar AYH-3, primarily used in agricultural spraying and other forms of aerial application. //
