Effects Of Farmers’ Participation In Off-Farm Work On Land Conservation Investments

The households’ non-agriculture transfer has great significance on promoting china’s rural-urban integration and rural economic development. However, due to the continuous non-agricultural transfer of rural labor force, many problems have emerged, such as neglected protection of farmland quality and extensive use of farmland, which have caused the degradation of the quality of farmland. Since the reform and opening up, households’ investment become the main investment in agricultural production, Farmers’ land use behaviors will have a direct impact on the quality of farmland. So how to encourage households to increase land conservation investments, achieving the sustainable use of farmland, will be an urgent problem to be solved.After reviewing the related theories and researches, this paper firstly constructs a general analytical framework in the perspective of income effect and labor effect, including off-farm work, off-farm incomes and land conservation investments, from which we could theoretically analyze the affects of households’ off-farm activities on their land conservation investments.Then, based on household survey data in three counties of the northeastern hilly region in Jiangxi, this paper empirically testes the related factors affecting households’ those three behaviors with poisson model, tobit model, and probit model. Draws the following main conclusions:(1) Factors affecting households’ off-farm work activitiesWhile the number of labor force in household has positive impact on both local off-farm activity and migration, househeads’ off-farm experience, average age and educated level of labors have obviously different impacts. Households whoes househeads have off-farm experience usually tend to participate in local off-farm activities rather migration; Compared with local off-farm activities, migrant decisions are more affected by labors age and educated level. what’s more, an inverted "U" relationship is found between the number of migration and average age of labors, implicating that the number of migration would increase firstly and then reduce with the increase of the average age of labors.(2) Factors affecting households’ off-farm incomesThe results of this study show that the occupation and place of non-farm work more significantly affect the households’ off-farm incomes than number of non-farm workers. Different with Previous findings, the number of non-farm workers has no significant affects on both local off-farm incomes and remittances. Moreover, human capital factors, such as off-farm experience and average education level of labors, have greater impact on off-farm income than factors like number of elders, kids and farmland.(3) Factors affecting land conservation investmentsOverally speeking, households who participate in migration appears more obviously in income effect and lost-labor effect than those participate in local off-farm activity. While the number of labor force participation in migration has a negative impact on manure application, the remittance of migration has a positive impact on crop residue recycling. From the perspective of human capital improving effect, the non-farm employment experience of household head would have a negative impact on manure application.Finally, this paper put forward some relevant recommendations based on the above conclusions, they are:local governments should strengthen support and develop local economy, so that it could absorb local and return labor force; pay more attention to left-behind children and the elderly in rural areas; during the labor force transition, local governments should not blindly pursue the transition quantity, they should pay attention to cultivate the quality of labor force and improve their working environment; In terms of land conservation investments, local governments should provide more supply-demand information for both livestock farms and households. What’s more local governments should increase more subsidies for machinery costs in the process of crop residue recycling, encourage households to take more labor-saving measures in the work of land conservation investments.