Behavior of Green Production Technology and Impact on Technical Efficiency——Evidence from China's Apple Growers

Abstract

Under the common requirements of ensuring food security and agricultural green development goals, how to explore a way of coordinated development of cultivated land protection and utilization, and effectively achieve "storing grain in the land and storing grain in technology" is the focus of sustainable agricultural development in China. Based on the field survey data of 233 apple growers in typical apple growing areas of Shaanxi and Shanxi in China, this paper used the Super-SBM model to measure agricultural technical efficiency and the propensity score matching (PSM) method to analyze the impact of green production technology adoption behavior on agricultural technical efficiency, and the dimension of green production technology adoption was further expanded to analyze the impact of different technology adoption conditions on technical efficiency. The results showed that the average production technical efficiency of apple growers in typical apple growing areas of Shaanxi and Shanxi was 0.513, which had a large room for improvement on the whole. After eliminating sample selection bias by using PSM method, adopting green production technology could significantly improve the technical efficiency of apple growers. According to the results, the corresponding policy suggestions were provided to promote the adoption of technology by apple growers, protect the health of soil, improve the production efficiency of apple growers and realize the green development of agriculture.