Vietnam plans to mechanize over half of its agriculture by 2010, local newspaper Vietnam News reported Thursday.

Specifically, some 90 percent of agricultural products' preservation and processing work would have been mechanized by 2010, under a scheme worked out by the country's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Pilot mechanization projects will first be introduced to agricultural centers, including major rice-producing areas. Upon successful completion of the projects, they will be then replicated in other regions.

Compared with 1990, the number of tractors now in use in Vietnam has surged by 9.5 times, and water pumps used in irrigation projects have increased by 7.9 times, according to the ministry's Institute for Agriculture Electrical Engineering and Post Harvest Technology.

Now, some 67 percent of cultivated land is ploughed by tractors. Farmers nationwide use over half a million rice harvesting and threshing machines, an increase of 10 times that of 1990.