Enabling for-profit pest control firms to meet farmers’ preferences for cleaner production: Evidence from grain family farms in the Huang-huai-hai plain, China

Abstract

Pest control services facilitate cleaner production by farmers. To promote the interest of farmers in adopting pest control services for cleaner production, the preference of farmers for pest control firms must be determined. Based on a survey of 433 grain family farms in the Huang-huai-hai Plain and using the choice experiment method, this study eliminates the ordering effect through prior “warm-up” and “disclosure” and uses inferred attribute non-attendance to process information on the attributes of for-profit pest control firms that were neglected by grain family farms. The hierarchical Bayes generalized mixed logit model was used to examine the preference for for-profit pest control firms by grain family farms. The results indicate that grain family farms prefer to adopt pest control services and select for-profit pest control firms that satisfy their requirements (the coefficient of alternative specific constant, −0.627, is significant and negative). Grain family farms are heterogeneous in their preferences of for-profit pest control firms, and they particularly prefer those provide yield commitment, with high service efficiency, and allow payment delayed (the values of the mean coefficients are all greater than 1.0). Under the same combination of for-profit pest control firms attributes, the increase in profit per mu for grain family farms with highly educated farmers, who mainly plant rice and highly acknowledge the value of pest control services and the danger of chemical pesticides can possibly increase further (all interaction terms of alternative specific constant, i.e., −0.394, 0.381, −0.453, −0.779, −0.431 and −0.428, are significant).