Kilkenny tractor returns from Africa after seventeen years!

A Kilkenny-designed and built tractor that was ‘lost’ in a system of African bureaucracy for almost 17 years, has finally made it back home.

The prototype machine was built in a cowshed in Danesfort in 2005 by local man Roger Stephenson. The following year, in 2006, the tractor began its adventure when it went to Ghana, West Africa, for demonstrations and field trials with the Ministry of Agriculture of Ghana.

After the trials were completed the shipment was then supposed to go to Kenya and Ethiopia but unfortunately, Roger said, bureaucracy took over and the shipment got stuck in a shipping container in Accra, the capital of Ghana.
And that was where the tractor stayed until this year!

“It would take until this time last year before I could get a Ghanaian minister to look at the initial agreement and confirm that in fact the shipment was my property and cleared the way for me to remove it back to Ireland,” Roger explained. It then took another year to clear the bureaucratic shipping hurdles to get the ‘lost’ machine back to Dublin.

TAKE NOTE: Bank Holiday Weekend weather forecast for Kilkenny!

In April of this year it arrived back in County Kilkenny - 17 years after it was shipped out.

Roger developed the tractor to make machinery more accessible to small farmers in African countries. They are multi-use and designed for the specific challenges of the landscape and agricultural work they will tackle in countries like Ghana and Tanzania.

In many countries large, commercial tractors have been shipped in and contractors do work on smaller holdings. Roger’s tractor is designed to be built and maintained in local communities, helping them to adapt and modify their farming methods, if needed, and allowing the farmer to escape a ‘poverty trap.’

Find out more about this unique tractor, and the work Roger is doing, on Facebook and Youtube under ‘Tractor Factor Africa.’