ABSTRACT Farm mechanisation is a practice of doing work on agricultural farms by means of machinery instead of human or animal labour.

Land preparation, tillage operation, planting operation and harvesting operation are all farm practices that have been mechanized. Three forms of bed preparation are commonly used in farming namely; flat, heaps and ridges. Ridge-making has been mechanised, leaving heaping to be done manually using the handmade hoe. In West Africa, specifically South-West Nigeria, heaps are traditionally believed to bring forth more produce and so preferred to ridges especially for the cultivation of tuber crops. This leaves farmers with no option other than to make heaps manually, a timeconsuming and tedious operation. In this research project, an attempt is made to design a four-bar mechanism to carry out the heaping operation. The angles and distance of the four positions were obtained and specified as input for the synthesis of the four-bar mechanism using four-position synthesis and Burmester theory programmed in MATLABTM and the link lengths calculated were input to MSC ADAMS to simulate the behaviour of the mechanism from which the best design was selected. Results suggest that the method of four-position synthesis can be used to design an appropriate mechanism to make heaps.