Taslima Begum is a house wife in Kandakul village under Faridpur District. She and her husband, a marginal farmer, work hard for the well-being of their three children. Since income from agriculture is not always sufficient to meet their family requirements, she helps her husband in their field to reduce the workload and the cost of hired labor, in addition to her housewife responsibilities.

Prior to joining with CSISA-BD, Taslima and her husband had never seen a reaper. In 2013, project staff organized a one-day training session in her village on wheat production under strip tillage and bed planting.

The training featured a wheat reaper as an example of a profit-increasing technology. After her participation in the training, and obtaining additional knowledge about wheat reapers from a short video, Talisma asked CSISA-BD staff to do a demonstration on wheat reaper harvesting each time they visited her 120 decimal field. This request was realized on March 31st, when CSISA-BD CIMMYT personnel organized a demonstration in her field. She was astounded by the results:

“This is awesome, mind-blowing, an amazing machine, which I had never thought about and had never seen before. It is unbelievable how this machine cut the wheat so quickly from my 120 decimal of land… It will reduce our labor cost remarkably, as well as protect our crop from sudden environmental catastrophe. One reaper machine is enough for one village… I realize that it has a great commercial prospect”.
Last year, she and her husband produced wheat on this land and required 16 labor units (i.e. 4 laborers for 4 days) to harvest the wheat. This year, it took only 2 hours for the reaper machine to harvest the same area. They were both very happy with this simple, but powerful, technology because it is easy to handle, requires little work, and generates quick returns. Taslima and her husband are very interested in obtaining a reaper of their own for the future.