Evaluation and mapping of the agricultral mechanization level in Turkey's using GIS

Benefiting from the agricultural mechanization at different levels in farms affects the agricultural production in terms of the productivity and quality increase . For this reason, surviving in the though competition environment of agricultural product markets highly depends on planned and well organized mechanization applications in farm scale. Comparing the mechanization level in terms of commonly accepted criteria and interrelating them with productivity for the farms which produce same kinds of products are so important. in the scope of this work, mechanization levels of each province and agricultural region of Turkey were calculated from Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) data and mapped by using a GIS software. As a result, according to the criterion of mechanical power per unit production area (kW/ha), based on the 2001 data, the mechanization level of Turkey was 1,65 kW/ha. When the agricultural regions were compared from the kW/ha point of view, it can be seen that Marmara region has the highest value with 3,3 kW/ha while the lowest value was in East region as 0.70 kW/ha. Key words: Agricultural Mechanization, Mechanization Level, Geographical Information Systems, GIS, Mapping.