A Research On The Influencing Factors Of Farmers’ Input Of The Socialized Service For Agricultural Machanization

Since the Chinese economic reform and opening, the average annual growth rate of China’s agricultural machinery power has reached 6.67 percent so far. In the year of 2007, China’s agricultural mechanization entered the middle stage of development, while agricultural social service is developing rapidly. From 2008 to 2011, the average annual growth rate of the employees in agricultural machinery service organizations has reached 13.27% in China. In 2012,2/3 of the area of the total agricultural machinery work is completed by social service organizations, which are 40 million hectares of farmland. However, compared with developed countries, there suppose to be great potential to improve for the agricultural machanization of China. Taking Japan as an example, as small-scale peasant agriculture economy as China, its agricultural machinery social service is quite advanced, more than 90% of agricultural operations are realized by machinery. In Japan and the mechanization rates of rice planting and harvesting are up to 98% and 99%, while the rates in China are only 23.84% and 69.32%. The improvement of the agricultural mechanization in China needs to learn from developed countries, and base on the real fact of land fragmentation in China. For this purpose, Chinese government published The Advices on Speeding Up the Agricultural Machinery Social Service in 2012, clearly stipulating that China should carry out agricultural machinery social service, strengthen the junctions between agricultural machinery owners and users, expands the scale of agricultural machinery services, in order to improve the utilization and efficiency of the agricultural machinery operating in China, as an effective solution to the contradictions between the large-scale agricultural machinery operations and the small-scale production for millions of individual farmers. In fact, the agricultural social service depends on both aspects below. First, it depends on the effective demand of farmers, determined by different contents and forms of services. Second, it depends on the effective supply of services organizations, determined by the extent and quality of the performance of the services (Zhao Guilong,2006). Therefore, as the first step to improve the socialized service for agricultural mechanization, it’s essential to understand the demand of farmers by answering the questions below. What factors influence the famers’choices on agricultural machinery services? What is the trend of future demand? Those answers help to figure out system and balance between supply and demand. From the perspective of demand, this paper focuses on the empirical research of tow counties seperatly located in the central and northern Jiangsu. The results indicate that the per capita agricultural incomes, the sizes of arable lands, the employment of farmers affect the demand for agricultural machinery social services. Also, as the transfer of agricultural labor and land accelerates, the demand for agricultural machinery services increases. The research also finds that the current supply of agricultural machinery services cannot meet the demand in Jiangsu province, accompanied by serious information asymmetry for both supplier and demander. In order to solve those problems, this paper tries to build a developing system of agricultural machinery services, including market supply, institutional supply and technical supply, looking forward to offer references to the agricultural machinery services development in China.