Economic and Environmental Effects of Farmers’ Green Production Behaviors: Evidence from Major Rice-Producing Areas in Jiangxi Province, China

Abstract

This study examines the economic and environmental impacts of green production practices among farmers. It aims to contribute to sustainable agricultural development, mitigate agricultural non-point source (NPS) pollution, and align environmental protection with economic growth. This paper utilizes survey data from 1345 farm households in the main rice production areas of Jiangxi Province, China, using the example of reduced fertilizer application (RFA) among rice farmers. This study constructs a slack-based measure data envelopment analysis (DEA—SBM) model with undesirable outputs to measure environmental effects and applies an endogenous switching regression model (ESRM) to test the economic and environmental effects of farmers’ adoption of green production technologies. We found the following: (1) The RFA behavior of farmers has a significant positive impact on their net profit per hectare (NPH), helping farmers increase their income, with the increase ranging from 2.05% to 6.54%. (2) Farmers’ RFA behavior has a significant positive impact on agricultural green productivity (AGP), contributing to the improvement of the environment, ranging from 44.09% to 45.35%. (3) A heterogeneity analysis found inconsistencies in the income-enhancing and environmental-enhancing effects at different quantiles of NPH and AGP. Therefore, attention should be placed on improving the agricultural product quality supervision system under the market circulation mechanism, creating land scale conditions conducive to the promotion and application of fertilizer reduction technologies and promoting the implementation of externality internalization compensation systems.