Study On The Opportune Scale Of Family Farms

The household contract system has liberated the rural productive forces, and made great contribution to the improvement of agricultural production efficiency, the increasement of farmer income, and the rapid development of rural economy and society. After 38 years of development, the original production relations in rural areas can not adapt to the development of productive forces. There are a series of new problems to be solved in the agricultural development, such as low efficiency of agriculture, slow growth of farmer income, wide gap between urban and rural income, loss of a large number of agricultural labor. Agriculture is becoming a sideline, and is relying more and more on old farmers, the countryside is declining, and farmers are becoming fewer. With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, agriculture is lagging more, the Three Rural Issues are more and more serious, and becoming the largest short board of China’s current development, it restricts the process of industrialization, information and urbanization, affects the interests and the happiness index of the 700 million farmers directly, and also become a threat to the national strategic security and food safety of 1 billion 300 million people.In order to solve the new problems in the field of agriculture and rural areas, China decide to change the mode of agriculture development and speed up the construction of agricultural modernization, and make a great effort to realize the four modernization simultaneously. To accommodate to the new development of rural productive forces, a series of policies are made to improve the agricultural production relations. The governments make great efforts to explore a more suitable agricultural development mode, and to build a new agricultural management system according with its situation. The first document of CPC in 2003 has pointed out clearly that, agricultural production and management system should be innovated, the right of using land is encouraged to be transferred to professional leading enterprises, family farms, and farmers’ cooperatives. In 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture issued guidance on promoting the development of family farms; it includes the basic principles and ways to cultivate the development of family farms, and the support policies of developing family farms. In 2015, the Ministry of Finance issued the opinions on supporting various forms of opportune scale management to promote the transformation of agriculture.Local governments make enthusiasms in building new agricultural management system and developing modern agriculture with the support of the national policy. But also there are some problems that need to be solved urgently in practice:At first, the comparative advantage of the new agricultural business entities is not clear, more emphasizes are put on leading enterprises with large capital, it is not conducive to the development of agriculture. The second, the scale of family farm is not clear, a limit scale is often set, a large scale is always encouraged, but not an opportune scale, it does not conform to the objective reality and economic laws. The third, the farmer is the main body of land circulation, government is often in a dislocation, and is always offside. The fourth, agriculture funds are used inefficiently, it is urgent to change the use of agriculture funds.In view of the above problems, the author analysis the pros and cons of the statement in case by using the comparative method, by comparing the efficiency of leading enterprises, farmers’ cooperatives, traditional farmers and appropriate scale family farms, it is concluded that leading enterprises have the advantage in the sales process, the deep processing of products and in the international market competition. Farmers’ cooperatives can provide services for all the process of agricultural production, connecting small farmers to big market through the joint with farmers, Traditional farmers should turn from a small scale to a opportune scale in agricultural production, and change agricultural management mode from self sufficiency to the commercialization of business. It draws to the conclusion that modest scale family farm is the main carrier to realize agricultural modernization, and it should be the object of government support.Large scale is not the purpose of land circulation, the relationship between the governments with the market should be properly managed, and the government should focus on constructing the service platforms to promote marketization of land circulation. Contemporary family farmers must be selected and cultivated from the local farmers, Those young farmers who have experienced the market economy with non farm work experience and with the spirit of entrepreneurs are suitable to be contemporary farmers. The suitable family farm agricultural technology should meet the following six standards:The scale of land demand is not high, capital investment requirements are not high, the technical difficulty is not high, the risk is under control, labor time is distributed reasonably, and the effect of improving income is obvious. In the use of funds supporting for agriculture, we should change the method to give funds directly to leading enterprises, the limited funds should be used to train family farmers, to research and introduce suitable agricultural technology, to optimize agricultural socialization service, and to construct demonstration family farms.