The Age Structure Of The Agricultural Labor Force, Agricultural Machinery Socialized Service And Rice Production

Aging of population has become a common problem faced by many countries in the world, China is no exception. In addition to low fertility, low mortality and other reasons, youth-oriented migration of rural labor to cities, makes the rural population aging more severely, age structure of the agricultural labor force has occurred significant changes, and agricultural labor force ageing trends became apparent. Age of the labor force growth, can cause strength, health, literacy, business skills, ideological awareness, technical proficiency, and other change, lead to decreased quantity and quality of human capital, and may affect farmers’ food production in many ways, such as food plant choice, factor inputs and application of science and technology. In different areas, natural resources endowment, levels of socio-economic development, agricultural machinery socialized service, and substitution effect to labors will all be different, age structure of the agricultural labor force effects on food production in various regions, there might be some differences. With rice as the research object, comparing the behavioral differences with different age structure of the agricultural labor force in different regions, and analyzing the role played by agricultural machinery socialized service, can help us clear the relationship between age structure of the agricultural labor force and food production, and has an important theoretical and practical significance for answering questions like "Tomorrow, who’s going to grow food".This article uses economic theory and methods, describes the history and status of China’ age structure of population, agricultural machinery socialized service, and rice production, makes an empirical analysis of the differences in rice production of households with different age structure in different regions, then gives an cause analysis. This paper is divided into seven chapters:Chapter Ⅰ introduces the background and significance, submits questions and hypotheses, then introduces content, methods, data sources and technology roadmap of the study, summarizes possible innovations and shortcomings at last.Chapter Ⅱ mainly introduces definitions, literature reviews and some theories.Chapter Ⅲ analyzes the possible path age structure of agricultural labor force effecting on rice production in conjunction with the relevant theory, and make a description of empirical model and related variables.Chapter Ⅳ make a detailed description about development and status from a macro perspective. The data indicates that rural population has presented old age structure characteristic. Socialized agricultural machine service got rapid development, but it still should be improved. Rice sown area was stable, production has increased continuously, but the net profit was less and fluctuated widely, it may be an important factor that affects rice production.Chapter Ⅴ describes the basis situation of the sample from micro perspective, through correlation analysis of basic statistics data, gets some perception on the relationship between the three main variables, and laid the foundation for the empirical analysis below.Chapter Ⅵ is the most central part of the paper; the discussion divides into three parts. Including the effect that age structure of labor force has on rice sown proportion, factor input and rice yield in different regions. According to the result, middle-aged and elderly farmers have no unwanted effect on rice product.Chapter Ⅶ gets some conclusions based on the results of empirical analysis. Agricultural machinery socialized service organization’s rapid development, provides convenient conditions for the application of production factors, agricultural machinery, science and technology, effectively propelled element substitution. The restriction function that farmers’ age growth played on rice production became weaker. Middle aged and old farmers in rice-growing area and yields are not inferior to young farmers. Oppositely in some regions, due to fewer non-farm employment opportunities, middle-aged and elderly agricultural labor force will pay more attention to rice production. Therefore, just judging from the production, ageing of the agricultural labor force in this stage does not affect rice production.