Abstract
Agricultural green production (AGP) and efficiency improvement of smallholders’ management are the objective requirements for the development of China’s modernized agriculture and the understanding of the rural vitalization strategy. Based on field survey data of 582 rice farmers in Shaanxi Province, this study used the Logit model to analyze the determinants of smallholders’ adoption of agricultural green production technology (AGPT) and used the propensity score matching (PSM) method to measure the effect of AGPT on the technical efficiency (TE) of rice production and the heterogeneity of this influence among smallholders. Results showed that the AGPT adoption rate and the mean of rice production TE were 15.1% and 0.312, both had a lot of room for improvement. Furthermore, it was found that household’s characteristics, family characteristics, agricultural management characteristics, social characteristics, and cognitive characteristics significantly affect smallholders’ AGPT adoption, and the AGPT adoption significantly increased the TE of rice production by 18.8 to 24.5%. Besides, farmers with older age, less education, more specialized planting, more fragmented land, and more off-farm employment adopting AGPT could significantly improve the TE; the increase proportion was 29.8%, 29.5%, 21.3%, 27.2%, and 16.8%. The study also showed that the AGPT could not significantly increase the rice output value of smallholders. In addition, considering the endogeneity problem caused by sample selection bias, the study re-estimated using the endogenous transformation regression (ESR) model which showed that the promotion of AGPT to TE was still robust. The study puts forward policy recommendations on how to further promote the adoption of AGPT and improve the TE by farmers.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The data comes from the “Sustainable Development Plan of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in Shaanxi Province (2014-2020)” released by Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Shaanxi Province. URL: http://nyt.shaanxi.gov.cn/www/ghjh1188/20161209/574026.html
Based on divided farmers according to 0.67 hectares of cultivated land standard in the third national agricultural census, in this study, smallholders are classified according to the standard of rice cultivation area less than or equal to 0.67 hectares; At the same time, scholars often use 0.67 hectares as the standard to study smallholders, such as Han (2018).
The above calculation process is to retain three decimal places, the same below.
The average of cultivated land number is 5.473 blocks, and the median is 5.000 blocks, so according to the characteristics of the sample, used 5 blocks as the dividing point to divide the sample.
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The survey was sponsored by a major project supported by the National Natural Social Science Major Foundation of China (No.15ZDA052).
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Chaoqiong Li: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Software, Methodology, Writing—original draft. Yuxing Shi: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Software, Methodology. Sufyan Ullah Khan: Data curation, Investigation, Writing—review and editing. Minjuan Zhao: Funding acquisition, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision.
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Li, C., Shi, Y., Khan, S.U. et al. Research on the impact of agricultural green production on farmers’ technical efficiency: evidence from China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 38535–38551 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13417-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13417-4