Draft Animals, Farm Machines and Sustainable Agricultural Production: Insight from China

Abstract

Although draft animals have been playing an essential role in agricultural production worldwide, in recent decades there has been a trend towards replacing draft animals with farm machines. In the areas facing labour shortage due to rural-to-urban migration, the use of farm machines is especially expected to enhance agricultural production and productivity. However, little is known about the extent to which the farm machine use substitutes draft animal use and how the two production activities jointly affect agricultural performance. To fill this gap, this paper attempts to examine the long-run and short-run effects of farm machine use on draft animal use using a pooled mean group estimator, and to estimate the joint effects of farm machine use and draft animal use on agricultural productivity using a panel production function model. The empirical results show that a 1% increase in farm machine use rate tends to decrease draft animal use by 2.82% in the long-run, but it does not have a statistically significant impact on draft animal use in the short-run. In addition, we find that output elasticity of farm machine use has increased from −0.161 in 1978 to 0.170 in 2012, while that of draft animal use has decreased from 0.185 to −0.129 over the same time period. Our findings highlight the importance of government's efforts in promoting an agricultural transition from animal power to machine power in order to increase sustainable agricultural production.

Farm machinery use and maize yields in China: an analysis accounting for selection bias and heterogeneity

“…Farm machinery use is the key explanatory variable, which refers to a dummy variable identifying whether a household used a rotary cultivator for land preparation, that is land ploughing and levelling (1 = users and 0 = nonusers). We focus on farm machinery use in the land preparation stage rather than other production stages because land preparation has been identified as the most power-intensive stage in agricultural production (Kienzle et al 2013;Zhou et al 2018), and it directly affects the use of inputs (e.g. seed, fertiliser and pesticide) and finally affects maize outputs.…”

“…2013; Zhou et al . 2018), and it directly affects the use of inputs (e.g. seed, fertiliser and pesticide) and finally affects maize outputs.…”

Farm Machine Use and Pesticide Expenditure in Maize Production: Health and Environment Implications

“…Farm machines play an important role in sustainable and conservation agriculture development in emerging and developing countries [18,19,20,21]. A considerable body of literature has analyzed the impact of the use of farm machines on agricultural production [21,22,23,24,25].…”

“…The existing studies have so far paid more attention to the total machine power or machine use intensity in their efforts to analyze their determinants. However, studies are almost completely absent on farm machine use at a specific production stage such as pesticide application [20]. Second, we take the possible endogeneity of farm machine use into account, in particular stemming from the self-selection process, in our estimated econometric models.…”

Legacy of draught cattle breeds of South India: Insights into population structure, genetic admixture and maternal origin

“…Over time, with increasing mechanization of agriculture, the use of draught cattle in farm operations reduced significantly and became negligible in advanced economies. However, in developing countries, particularly in small holder production systems and in hilly and mountainous regions, agricultural production still relies on draught animal power [ 1 ]. For example, 55% of the smallholder farmers in Swaziland rely on draft animal power for land cultivation, and more than 88% of draft animals found on the Swazi National Land are cattle [ 2 ].…”