Impact Of Information And Communication Technology On Farmers’ Quality And Safety Production Behavior

The quality and safety of agricultural products is an important issue related to the national economy and people’s livelihood.With economic development and the continuous improvement of the Chinese living standards,consumers are paying increasing attention to the "safety" and "quality" of agricultural products.However,problems with the quality and safety of agricultural products remain and are relatively serious.As the micro-subject of agricultural production,farmers’ quality and safety production behavior plays a key role in ensuring the quality and safety of agricultural products.Information acquisition has an important impact on farmers’ production behavior.Information and communication technology,as an important means for farmers to obtain information,develops rapidly in China.On the one hand,it can break the time and space barriers to information access,help farmers reduce information searching cost,increase their information acquisition channels and,on the other,help farmers consolidate and establish strong and weak social network relationships,thereby helping them to obtain heterogeneous information and enhance risk resilience,subsequently affecting farmers’ production behavior.Based on information asymmetry theory,transaction cost theory,farmer behavior theory,planned behavior theory,technology adoption theory and other theories,this paper uses the survey data of 787 vegetable growers in Shouguang,Shandong Province,and employs OLS model,Tobit model,Ordered Probit model,mediating effect model,Heckprobit model and other models to empirically study the impact and its mechanism of information and communication technology use on farmers’ quality and safety production behavior from the four aspects of the behavior: quality and safety production cognition,agrochemical application behavior,quality and safety production technology adoption behavior,and quality and safety production behavior effect.Finally,this study proposes policy measures to improve the application level of information and communication technology in rural areas,enrich and optimize the means of information dissemination on information and communication technology platforms,accelerate the low-cost diffusion of high-quality information,and effectively promote the appropriate combination of "communication network" and "social network",in order to provide theoretical and practical reference with which to further optimize the allocation and application of information and communication technology and other information acquisition resources in rural areas,improve both farmers’ quality and safety production behavior,and the quality and safety of agricultural products and farmers’ well-being,additionally,to address the theoretical gap in existing research on the impact of information and communication technology on farmers’ production behavior.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)The number of vegetable farmers using information and communication technology in the sample area needs to be increased,and the intensity of information and communication technology use is low,whilst the number of farmers learning agriculture knowledge with information and communication technology is small.Additionally,there are differences in the use of information and communication technology among farmers with different characteristics.Moreover,farmers’ quality and safety production awareness is relatively weak,and farmers’ awareness of all dimensions of quality and safety production needs to be improved.In addition,farmers’ expenditure on pesticide and chemical fertilizer application decreases after using information and communication technology,but the quantity of both inputs should be reduced more.Furthermore,farmers’ adoption of quality and safety production technology is low,with the mean value of technology adoption being only 1.70.Finally,the economic effect of farmers’ quality and safety production,the effect of agricultural product quality and safety and the effect of market participation all need to be improved.(2)Information and communication technology use has a significant positive effect on farmers’ quality and safety production cognition.The estimation results of the OLS model,quantile regression method and other methods show that: the use of information and communication technology can improve farmers’ awareness of quality and safety production by 8.59%;for every 1 unit increase in the intensity of information and communication technology use,farmers’ quality and safety perception level will increase by 7.01%.In addition,learning agriculture knowledge,reading the news,and social communication can significantly increase farmers’ awareness of quality and safety production,and the results are significant at the 1%,5% and 10% significance levels;their impact coefficients are 9.51%,7.45% and 9.22%,respectively.Moreover,the use of information and communication technology can significantly improve farmers’ safety and quality production cognition levels by 9.71% and 19.88%,respectively.(3)The use of information and communication technology has a significant negative impact on farmers’ agrochemical application behavior.The results of the Tobit model regression show that the use of information and communication technology significantly reduces farmers’ expenditure on pesticides and fertilizers by 33.3191 yuan and 62.2044 yuan,respectively.The mediating effect model results demonstrate that the impact mechanisms of the information and communication technology influence on agrochemical application behavior are reducing the information searching cost,enhancing the selling bargaining power and increasing the level of farmers’ safety risk cognition.The heterogeneity analysis results conducted using group regression method show that the use of information and communication technology has a significant negative effect on the agrochemical application behavior of farmers in the group with less vegetable farming scale and lower education level,while the effect is negative significant on farmers of different age groups and there is no significant difference in the effect of different groups.(4)The use of information and communication technology has a significant positive effect on farmers’ adoption behavior of quality and safety production technologies(QST).The estimation results of the Ordered probit model show that the use of information and communication technology increases the probability of QST adoption by 16.77%.Further decomposing the QST adoption behavior,the results of the Heckprobit model show that the use of information and communication technology has a positive incentive effect on both the QST adoption decision and farmers’ adoption degree,whilst the promotion effect on farmers’ QST decision is greater.The mediating effect results confirm that strong and weak social network relationships play a partial mediating effect on the influence of information and communication technology use on farmers’ QST adoption behavior.The results of heterogeneity analysis using the group regression method show that the significance level of the information and communication technology use effect on skill-knowledge intensive technology is higher than that of traditional experience intensive technology;and the significance level of the strong relationship effect on traditional experience intensive technology is higher,and the significance level of the weak relationship effect on skill-knowledge intensive technology is higher.(5)By employing the OLS model,Ordered probit model and PSM model to analyze the effects of information and communication technology use on the economic effect of farmers’ quality and safety production,the agricultural product quality and safety effect and the market participation effect,the study shows that,firstly,the use of information and communication technology has a significant positive effect on the economic effect of farmers’ quality and safety production.Compared with farmers who do not use information and communication technology,the use of information and communication technology can increase the net income of vegetable cultivation by 0.4849 units.Secondly,the use of information and communication technology has a significant effect on the quality and safety of agricultural products,compared with farmers who do not use information and communication technology,the use thereof improves the agricultural products’ quality and safety level by 16.38%.Finally,the use of information and communication technology can significantly improve the market participation effect of farmers,and the use thereof has a positive incentive effect on sales fluency and transaction frequency,and the results are significant at the 1% and 5% levels,respectively.(6)Based on the findings of the empirical study,this study proposes policy recommendations related to enhancing the application level of information and communication technology in villages,building an informationization training system,accelerating the low-cost diffusion of high-quality information,establishing broad online and offline production technology adoption experience sharing platforms,improving farmers’ quality and safety production behavior,and enhancing the quality and safety level of agricultural products and farmers’ well-being.