Abstract— Cameroon has an economy strongly dominated by the agricultural sector and despite this domination as well as the fact that this sector is backed by several policy documents and statements, investments in the sector is still grossly underdeveloped. Many farm operators in the different agro ecological environment still rely to an overwhelming extend on the use animate power to achieve their agricultural production goals. This power source and the tools used have implicit limitation in terms of energy and operational output. Cameroon government persistently carry out some initiative to inverse the tendency such as the providing modern agricultural equipment and machinery to farm operators, training complex farm machinery users. However, these solutions are not part of a common though and so far have produced mixed results without a significant improvement on the field. This paper permits to appreciate the challenges faced by users of farm technology in agricultural mechanization via four main crops of significant importance to Cameroon: Maize, Cassava, Sorghum and Cocoa.

Among others, it was observed that 75% of farmers involved in cultivation of sorghum, maize, cassava have land surfaces less than 2%. These small farm sizes are a serious handicap to the effective mechanization due to sparse and scattered cultivated lands. Also, only 13% (112) of farm operators have access to credit from micro finance institutions. This low access to credit contributes to the reluctance of farm operators to invest in agricultural machinery acquisition with only 3% owing a land with a land title.

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