A tea plucking machine at James Finlays Tea Estate in Kericho County. [FILE] For decades, Africa’s agricultural mechanisation has been guided by a stubborn assumption: if tractors transformed farming elsewhere, surely, they would do the same here. So, we shipped in large, expensive machines built for flat fields and industrial supply chains – and declared progress. The results are visible across the continent – idle equipment, spare parts out of reach, maintenance costs that exceed farm incomes, and machines abandoned after just a few seasons. This is not a failure of African agriculture or African farmers. It is a failure…