Do Agricultural Machinery Services Facilitate Land Transfer? Evidence from Rice Farmers in Sichuan Province, China

Abstract

Agricultural machinery services play an increasingly important role in the land transfer market, especially in developing countries. Prior studies have explored the impact factors of machinery use on agricultural production and land transfer, respectively. However, little research has focused on the relationship between the adoption of agricultural machinery services and the land transfer of rice farmers. To bridge this gap, this study investigated the correlation between machinery services and land transfer, using unique survey data of 810 rice farmers collected from Sichuan province in China. Additionally, this study further explored the impact mechanism on land transfer of rural households with IV-Probit and IV-Tobit models. The empirical results show the following: (i) Agricultural machinery services have a significantly positive and robust effect on both the incidence and area of rice farmers’ land transfer-in, while the impact degree is different. Specifically, with other conditions remaining unchanged, and with a 1% increase in the proportion of machinery services, the average probability of land transfer-in of rice farmers increased by 2.4%, and the area of land transfer-in increased by 13.4 mu, on average. (ii) For control variables, head education, agricultural certificates and whether the majority of land, are in a flat area have positive impacts on land transfer-in behavior. Yet, age and off-farm labor have a negative impact on land transfer-in area. Moreover, our findings highlight the importance of agricultural machinery services in stimulating the development of rural land rental markets.

The impact of agricultural machinery services on cultivated land productivity and its mechanisms: A case study of Handan city in the North China plain

“…The first mechanism highlights the impact of AMS on cultivated land productivity by alleviating the constraints caused by agricultural labor shortages. The rising wage rate and the wage gap between rural and urban sectors have attracted increasingly rural labor migration, which has resulted in the agricultural labor pool shrinking and aging over time (Ji et al, 2012;Yamauchi, 2016;Min et al, 2017;Yu et al, 2021). Input constraints on the quantity and quality of agricultural labor may lead to extensive farming operations and lagging technology adoption, and ultimately reduce cultivated land productivity.…”

“…The second mechanism focuses on the impact of AMS on the application of agricultural technology. The adoption of specialized agricultural techniques, such as deep soil ploughing, straw returning, and soil formula fertilization, often requires specific types of machinery (Shikuku, 2019;Zhou et al, 2020;Yu et al, 2021). Smallholders are constrained by factors such as access to information and capital as well as the limited size of cultivated land, and their adoption of new technologies is often slow and/or limited as a result (Tan et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2017).…”

“…Smallholders are constrained by factors such as access to information and capital as well as the limited size of cultivated land, and their adoption of new technologies is often slow and/or limited as a result (Tan et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2017). AMS provides mechanized operations and acts as a transmitter of agricultural technology (Mi et al, 2020;Yu et al, 2021). As such, AMS may lead to technological improvement via the substitution of agricultural labor by mechanization as well as through the use of specialized machinery.…”

“…Most agricultural machines have strong asset specificity; that is, they cannot easily be adapted for other purposes. Purchasing multiple complex and specified agricultural machines would require smallholders to assume a prohibitively heavy financial burden (Yu et al, 2021). Moreover, the mechanisms for labor-saving and adopting new Frontiers in Environmental Science frontiersin.org technologies can separately reduce the cost per unit of cultivated land or the unit output yield.…”

Rural Population Decline, Cultivated Land Expansion, and the Role of Land Transfers in the Farming-Pastoral Ecotone: A Case Study of Taibus, China

“…This policy allows rural households to trade their land usage rights to others, if they are unwilling or unable to engage in agricultural production [23,24]. In 2017, more than 30% of all household farmers transferred their rural lands to another party with the total area of rural land transfer amounting to more than 33 million hectares ("ha" for short), which accounts for about 35% of the total household land area [25,26]. Many studies have pointed out the positive impacts of land transfer, including the prevention of cultivated land abandonment, improving the income of rural households, and the promotion of large-scale agricultural management [17,[27][28][29][30].…”