The Tea Production Scale Benefits Of The Tea Farmer Households

Under the stimulus of prosperity of the tea market, high revenue of growing and appeal of scale cultivation by academics, some tea farmers blindly expand growing area which causes seriously shortage of labor, especially in the reaping season. Due to this, workers become extremely scarce and the cost for labor increased dramatically and as a result the tea price soared sharply. On the other hand, resources were wasted because the fresh tea was left in the field and the utilization rate of summer tea was relatively low. Therefore, a suitable size of cultivation has became an issue which worth solving urgently. How to define the appropriate size at which the tea farmers can get the highest revenue without getting resources wasted is a practical question to be solved.Based on this context, taking the farmers that grow high-value agricultural product (tea in this case) in the main tea-growing areas in Zhejiang Province for example, this thesis applies a method that incorporate normative analysis and empirical analysis, investigates the profit of tea farmers and its impacting factors of different growing scales from a micro perspective of farmers and studies the problem of scale economics of tea farmers. Based on the empirical results, theoretical and empirical evidence is provided to guide farmers'behavior of production decision and enrich the knowledge in this filed.On the basis of descriptive statistics in farmers'tea growing, this thesis adopts an adjusted Cobb-Douglas production function to analyze the profit of farmers with different scale of production and the empirical results are as follows. Firstly, a great distinction among different production scales is found. The farmers in small-scale group (less than seven mu) uses 36 man-days per mu while farmers in the large-scale group uses only 23 man-days in the period between 2009 and 2010, 36.1% less than that of farmers in the small-scale group. Secondly, tea cultivation has low economics of scale under the current technology of low level of mechanization and dependence on hand-made. Not only does the net profit per mu of farmers in the large-scale group is far lower than that of farmers in the small-scale group, but the farmers in the large-scale group also have lower land productivity and profit rate of cost than the farmers in the large-scale group. As a consequence, oversized production has negative effect on increasing profit of farmers.Based on the profit of farmers with different production scales and the problems that found in the field survey, the multiple linear regression model is used to test the theoretical hypothesis of the impact factors for net profit per mu for the farmers given in this thesis. The results are threefold. Firstly, head age, education level, number of people engaged in tea production and experience of farmers have a positive impact on net profit per mu of tea production. Moreover, the farmers located in suburb or township areas have a higher profit than farmers in ordinary areas. Secondly, family grow-area of tea and natural disaster impact negatively on net profit per mu. Thirdly, the impact of family involvement of non-agricultural industry, training of tea production and membership of cooperative association on net profit per mu is not statistically significant.Based on the above research, from the perspective of productivity improvement, policy recommendations for improving tea production are released in this thesis for government and households respectively. First, the government should not only prompt adjustment of production structure and innovation of technology, but should also emphasis structural movement of agricultural labor, build defense system for natural disaster and perfect operational mechanism of cooperative association by innovating new-form cooperatives. On the other hand, from the perspective of farmers, strategies like rational selection of growing area, not blindly expand growing area, implementation of specialized production and enhancement of tea-land management and investment on labor, are proposed.