Study On Farmer's Behavior In Maize Production With Participatory Rural Appraisal Method

The demand of livestock product will increase soon with China's economic rapid development. The demand of fodder grain will increase accordingly. So the future food problems will be the fodder grain problem in China. Maize is the main fodder grain, which is the third food crop. The other two-food crop is the paddy and wheat. But the maize lack competition in world market because our maize industry have small scale and low centrality. With China's accession to the WTO, export subsidy will be cancelled and the maize export will suffocate. And our maize lack competition in domestic market because of the disaccord between the maize product area and consumption area.Most maize product area is the poor area where the farm's income is low .So the impact of WTO not only influence the increase in farm's income, but also it infect the timely poverty alleviation. However, China agricultural research system ignores the farmer's technological need. There is a big cognition gap and behavior gap between government, agriculture researchers and extensionists. The disjoint phenomenon will hinder the agriculture development. So, fully acquaintance with the farm's need is very important.This research aims at finding the main constraints of major biophysical maize product regions and farmer's behavior difference in maize production , and analyzing the main reason of influencing the maize product and development. So as to provide sustainable policies for concerned authorities to amortize the impact of China's accession to the WTO.The study adopt a series of tool of PRA method, such as Semi-structured interview, group interview, direct sorting, and household sorting, based on data from 687 rural households in 25 counties of 6 provinces covering Jilin, Shandong, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan and Guangxi. We try to find the constraints of maize production and the farmer's product behaviors difference.Research results indicate that the biophysical environment and the production conditions have significant difference in five major agro-ecological regions. So the difference of main constraints in maize production is large. Drought, the growth technology, bad hybrid seed, lean soil, dust-brand and the bad production quality arethe major constrains in most agro-ecological regions. Drought is the most important constraints to China's maize development. There is regional and sexy difference in farmer's action of maize production. There exists technology need difference among all types of farmers which embody on the farmers' selection of diseases resisting and anti-adversity. There is a big cognition and behavior gap between government, agriculture researchers and extensionists.On the basis of the above research findings, this thesis puts forward the following policy recommendations: Reinforce invest into the drought research is the optimizing selection in agriculture research invest Reinforce the technological research which is suit to the women labor Deepen the agricultural technological extension reform, reinforcing invest into the agricultural technological extension Found a down to up agricultural technology system Deepen the maize research system reform...