Study On Farmers' Behavior Of Returning Straw To Field Directly

The quality of farmland in China has deteriorated seriously.It is an important measure to ensure sustainable capacity of agricultural production and then food security in China that to protect farmland quality and improve soil fertility.returning straw to field directly is one of the most suitable conservation tillage techniques.It has been shown that returning straw to field directly has good effects on organic matter and structure improvement of soil both by theory and experiment.In reality,however,the promotion of this technology is difficult.The enthusiasm of farmers to returning straw to field directly is generally low.The adoption ratio varies between and within regions.With blocked promotion of returning straw to field directly,many farmers burn the straw in the open air directly.It not only leads to a series of ecological problems(i.e.air pollution and deterioration of farmlands' fertility),but also contributes to social conflicts.In reality,all levels of Chinese government implement strict policy of prohibiting burning straw outdoor.This regulation always increases the burden of grassroots organizations,breeding social contradictions.Why do farmers have low enthusiasm of adopting returning straw to field directly considering the poor soil quality of farmlands and positive effect of returning straw to field directly on soil quality?Why is there such big heterogeneity of the adoption behavior of returning straw to field directly between different farmer households in different regions and within the same region?What is farmers' decision-making behavior and mechanism of returning straw to field directly?What are the differences between the production constraints of different farmers?The effect of returning straw to field directly is intertemporal and slow.This paper assumes this is the reason why the promotion of returning straw to field directly is blocked and different farmers have different technology adoption behaviors.The cost of returning straw to field directly occurred in the current period,but the effect of improving soil quality begins after straw is rotten and releases slowly.To some degree,returning straw to field directly has the nature of investment:the cost occurs at one time and technology benefits are divided into multiple periods.Meanwhile,the technology effect is also influenced by external natural factors and thus has strong uncertainty.Farmers' cognition of technology benefit,risk preference,time preference,benefit availability and other factors will all affect farmers' decision-making.Thus,the decision-making mechanism is more complex and more likely to be affected by production constraints.In sum,the enthusiasm of farmers to adopt returning straw to field directly must be related to the cost-benefit analysis.What is the technical effect and cost-benefit analysis result of returning straw to field directly?Now,Chinese government promotes returning straw to field directly mainly by regulation policy,supplemented by a small number of subsidies.What is the effect of this policy on farmers'decision-making behavior?To answer these questions,systematic in-depth and scientific research and argumentation are essential.This paper builds an analytical framework of farmers' agricultural technology adoption behavior when facing technology with intertemporal and slowly-released effect(i.e.Returning straw to field directly).Then,this study conducts an empirical analysis to explore the actual effect of farmers' benefit cognition,risk preference,time preference and term of land property right on farmers' adoption behavior of Returning straw to field directly,using survey data of 1118 plots from 679 households in 4 provinces in China.What's more,this paper does a cost-benefit analysis based on the actual situation in today's China.In the end,better incentive policies are also discussed combined with actual cases.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The economic benefit of returning straw to field directly is limited and the effect in improving soil quality is uncertain and easily affected by external environment.Thus,it is difficult to have induced changes in the adoption of this technology.Empirical analysis shows that returning straw to field directly has significant effect on yield of maize and rice but the magnitude is relatively small.Plus,there is no evidence that fertilization can be saved by adopting returning straw to field directly.Overall,thus,returning straw to field directly has low economic benefit and the diffusion of this technology is constraint by land system,land market and technology supply.(2)Intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology has the characteristic of strong uncertainty on its effect,which leads to a big difference between farmers' cognition of such technology.Farmers' benefit cognition has a significant positive effect on their technology adoption behavior and thus information demonstration which improves farmers'benefit cognition of returning straw to field directly will help farmers to adopt returning straw to field directly.Based on technology acceptance model,cognition is divided into perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.In this study,it is found that perceived ease of use plays a bigger role than perceived usefulness.To be specific,the effect of information,such as "the effect of returning straw to field directly takes time to work" and"increase application of fertilize can make returning straw to field directly works better",is not significant.However,the information that "where can I get access to returning straw to field directly" will significantly influent farmers adoption behavior.In addition,farmers'benefit cognition of returning straw to field directly is influenced by the external environment.The number of channels of agricultural knowledge and the existence of agricultural technology demonstration households both have positive effect on the adoption of Returning straw to field directly.(3)Intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology has the characteristic of slow effect and long period of action.Thus,scale farmers have higher enthusiasm in using Returning straw to field directly than small farmers because of lower time preferences.Meanwhile,scale farmers have more resource endowments,greater income of adopting technology,lower discount rate of technology income,and be more sensitive to future multiphase returns than the small farmers,so they are more inclined to use technologies like Returning straw to field directly.(4)Intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology has the characteristic of income being divided into multiple periods,so term of land property right is closely related to benefit uncertainty,and affects farmers' technology adoption behavior of Returning straw to field directly.This is mainly because term of land property right directly affects future benefits of technology.The land managed by small farmers is mainly owned by themselves,so their technology adoption behavior is not affected by term of land property right.Within scale farmers,farmers have longer term of land property right are more likely to get benefits from technology in the future,and thus prefer to use technology like Returning straw to field directly.(5)The economic benefit of returning straw to field directly is low,and it is divided into a long period of time.However,returning straw to field directly has positive externality,especially in reducing straw burning related environment problems.Thus,it is necessary for Chinese government to get involved to alleviate the problem of market failure.Based on econometric analysis and case analysis,this paper examines the effectiveness of China's current regulation policy and subsidy policy.The results show that,the current policy has reached its goal:both regulation policy and subsidy policy have a significant positive effect on farmers' technology adoption behavior of returning straw to field directly.Fines and other regulatory policies have stronger effect on Farmers' technology adoption behavior than subsidy policies.However,considering returning straw to field directly has great positive externalities,the current policy with regulation and fines is too harsh,and has low compensation for farmers.From the view of the fair distribution of welfare and the sustainability of the policy,the optimal direction of current policy should be to appropriately raise the compensation standard for farmers.In addition,the case study also shows that the degree of agricultural machinery sophistication,the degree of outsourcing service perfection,and the agronomic of returning straw to field directly affect the technology promotion.Based on the above conclusions,this paper puts forward the following policy suggestions:for intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology such as Returning straw to field directly,which has long-run effect and farmers have limited cognition,the government should pay special attention to technology demonstration and multi-channel positive guidance in the process of technology promotion.Different policies should be applied to different farmers with different scale of farmlands.Encouraging small farmers to adopt this kind of technology may need more subsidies or punishments.In terms of scale farmers,government needs to guarantee the future income of farmers to the land by improving the current land market,making further institutional arrangements of non-agricultural employment and rural social security,promoting the stability of the land rights of the scale farmers.In this way,longer term of land ownership can automatically encourage scale farmers to adopt this kind of technology.Current policies that overemphasize fines and regulations can be properly optimized.Increasing the compensation and subsidy level for farmers according to the realities of different regions may be a good choice.This paper is based on the perspective of income cycle,dividing agricultural technology into two categories:intertemporal and slow-released effect agricultural technology and immediate effect agricultural technology.Then,based on the characteristics of intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology,this paper studies farmers'agricultural technology adoption behavior of returning straw to field directly,analyses the differences in the agricultural technology adoption behavior of farmers with different operating scales,discusses the reason of returning straw to field directly difficult to induce change and the effect of imposed change.The study has important academic significance for deep understanding of farmers' adoption behavior of intertemporal and slowly available agricultural technology such as returning straw to field directly.This study also has important policy implications and practical significance for the country to take reasonable and effective policies to promote the diffusion and adoption of returning straw to field directly.