The machinery consists of tractors, rice combine harvesters, harrows, ploughs and trailers to support efforts by the government to make the country more self-sufficient in agriculture production.

Massey Ferguson is part of five core international brands, including Challenger, Fendt, GSI and Valtra, through which AGCO agricultural solutions are sold.

Launch

Launching the new machinery at Adenta in the Greater Accra Region, the Managing Director (MD) of Mechanical Lloyd, Mrs Kalysta Darko-O’Kell, said her company had served and would continue to serve hundreds of individual customers and businesses in the country and beyond with machinery from Massey Ferguson.

She said Mechanical Lloyd entered into an agreement with Massey Ferguson in 1972 to be the sole distributor of its products and services in Ghana.

“I am proud to mention that Mechanical Lloyd is one of the oldest Massey Ferguson representatives in Africa,” she said.

Mrs Darko-O’Kell noted that agriculture in Ghana employed more than half the country’s population on formal and informal bases and accounted for almost half of the GDP and export earnings.

She said the country produced a variety of crops in different climatic zones, ranging from dry savanna to wet forest, and which ran in east-west bands across the country.

The MD said agricultural crops, including yams, grains, cocoa and oil palm, formed the base of Ghana's economy.

The Deputy Director Agric Engineering Directorate of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Patrick Ohene Aboagye, said Mechanical Lloyd had been in the agriculture machinery trading business in the country for more than five decades and had contributed to different levels of mechanisation uptake in the country.

He said in most recent times, MoFA, recognising the importance and the role of the private sector under its Brazil More Food International programme, partnered Mechanical Lloyd through AGCO Brazil to provide after-sales support services.

With such partnership, he said the government was grateful to the company for its technical support and expressed the hope that it would continue to support farmers with excellent services.