Aresearch On Farmers’ Adoption Of Wheat Leading Varieties

Food production is highly related to a country’s economic development and social stability, Chinaattaches great importance to food security. Now the total grain production has been reached a gratifyingnine years consecutive growth since2004. However the hidden dangers of grain growth cannot beignored, which is the increasing in consumption demand and the lack of motivation of production. Thecontinuous growth of population, the reduction of the amount of arable land and the degradation of thequality of cultivated land, the loss of rural labor force all bring pressure on food production. In thiscontext, technology has become the key to improve the comprehensive grain production capacity andvariety improvement is the internal factor of grain production growth.The choice of species and the decision are held by farmers. Analysis of leading varieties is helpfulfor farmers to understand their needs, know the situation of promotion of the dominant species and thefactors that affect selection of dominant species, which has an important practical significance toimprove promotion of leading varieties and to formulate relevant policies.This dissertation makes descriptive analysis and binary logit model regression on the acquired datawhich based on a survey of303households in27administrative villages in six towns in Zhengyangcounty, Henan province. Also, it explores the situation that farmers select leading varieties.The result shows that there are57.76%local farmers chose the dominant species, which means thatwheat dominant species was recognized by the majority of farmers, but most of the farmers do not havea definite aware on the concept of dominant species. When purchasing seeds, households are mostlyconcerned with the quality and productivity of seeds. They do not have too much demand formanagement, tastes, prices, subsidies, etc. Government departments and acquaintances’recommendation are two most trusted sources for information. Today, farmers can purchase requiredvarieties in their own village or town. The shortage of seeds exists no more. The seed business isgrowing rapidly. But there are still a few exceptions that farmers bought fake seeds. While qualitycontrol in the seed market has achieved obvious success, it still cannot be taken lightly.The dependent variables in the model are divided into five categories: basic information of farmers,farmers’ production characteristics, cognition to varieties, agricultural promotion efforts, andgovernment subsidies. The regression result is quite ideal. Six of variables passed the test ofsignificance. which are the age of policy maker, the proportion of agricultural labor force in the family,household distance from the nearest market, the scale of cultivation, frequency of guidance fromagricultural workers and farmers’ opinions on whether the seeds they bought with subsidy. These sixvariables all create significant positive effects on farmers’ leading variety-choosing behavior.According to above results, the following policy recommendations are proposed: standardize management of the seed market, strengthen information sharing and demonstration promotion, value thedominant position of farmers, develop appropriately scaled operations, and increase publicity of subsidypolicy.