Impact Of Non-agricultural Income On Agricultural Production

Reform and opening-up has brought opportunities for farmer households to engage in non-agricultural jobs and operations, more and more people choose to abandon the original traditional agricultural production, and the share of non-agricultural earning in farmer household’s income has increased significantly. Currently, non-agricultural income has become the dominant component of farmer household’s income. This phenomenon has attracted wide attention from government to scholars, and some scholars have made a series of studies. But different scholars have different research focus, research methodsand data sources, so got different results and conclusions.Therefore, it is of some theoretical and practical significance to study the impact of the non-agricultural trend on various aspects of farm households’agricultural production based on the latest real survey data from the perspective of farm households.Based on the latest data acquired in the survey in Hebei Province in2013, this paper has further refined the research result based on previous researches. It has adopted BCC Model, Tobit Model, Binary Choice Model and Multiple Choice Model in DEA method to conduct an empirical research of the correlation between the non-agricultural trend with the agricultural input, output, efficiency and crop planting structure of farmer households. The research result shows that:1. The non-agricultural earning has become the major income of farmer households, and non-agricultural income has not hindered the progress of food production.The increase in non-agricultural income is the major impetus to the growth of income for most farmer households and66%of the household income in the sample farmer households comes from non-agricultural revenue. It is expected that in a short period, most farmer households cannot completely break away from agriculture. In a long period in the future, small farmer households are still the dominant players in agricultural production in China and the proportion of non-agricultural income of small farmer households may further increase.From the perspective of the overall sample, the increase in the proportion of non-agricultural income for farmer householdsh has not significantly influencing the per unit input and yield. Non-farm income of at least in the short term will not hinder the progress of food production.2. The non-agricultural trend exerts sharply different impacts on the yield and production technology efficiency of different crops. Generally speaking, the increase in the proportion of non-agricultural income for farmer households contributes to improving the per unit corn yield and significantly enhancing the core production technology efficiency while decreasing the per unit wheat yield and not significantly influencing the wheat production technology efficiency.3. The impacts of non-agricultural trend on capital input and output are somewhat different for farmer households of different income levels. When we study the impact of the non-agricultural trend and scale-based operation on the capital input and output of farmer households, the fanner households have been divided into two groups of the low-income group and the higher-income group according to their income level for separate analysis. The research shows that the non-agricultural trend has a positive correlation with both the input and output of the low-income group and has a negative correlation with both the input and output of the higher-income group.4. The non-agricultural income was beneficial to promot circulation of land in rural area. The research shows that the non-agricultural trend has a positive correlation with land outflow and has a negative correlation with land inflow.5The non-agricultural trend is not conducive to the diversification of crops for farmer households. The research result shows that the higher the proportion of non-agricultural income, the more reluctant they are to increase the variety of crops and they tend to only grow grains.6. Agricultural training and scale-based operation can help farmer households to adjust the input structure, increase output, and improve the agricultural production technology efficiency. The empirical research result shows that agricultural training can significantly increase the capital input in farmland for farmer households, conserved their labor input in farmland, and converted the input structure from labor to capital. Meanwhile, agricultural training can significantly improve the production technology efficiency of corn and wheat for farm households. While the yield remains the same, farm households that have once received agricultural training can effectively reduce the input in production materials.Finally, based on the research conclusions, the paper has put forward relevant policy suggestions and analyzed the weaknesses of the research to provide new materials and line of thinking for policy formulation and others’ research. China’s farmland planting scale for farmer households is relatively small:farmland per farmer household is6.62mu; cornfield area per household is6.16mu; and wheat field per household is6.11mu. The agricultural output of farmer households is in the stage of increasing returns to scale, so expanding the land operation scale can contribute to the improvement of the per unit crop yield. During the research, the actual operation farmland of farmer households has a significant positive correlation with the per unit corn and wheat yield.