Abstract
Protecting and improving cultivated land quality is a key way to the realization of agricultural modernization. The Chinese government advocates agricultural producers to implement cultivated land protection and quality improvement behavior (CLPQIB). However, the cultivated land management rights of family farms are not so stable. In order to study how stability of land management rights (SLMR) affects family farms’ CLQPIB, promoting family farms in adopting technologies to protect cultivated land, this study investigated 117 family farms in Anhui and Hubei provinces by stratified sampling and analyzed data through the logistic regression model and marginal effects model. The results showed that transferred land ratio, contract types, and contract duration affected family farms’ CLPQIB significantly. The probability of family farms applying organic fertilizer decreased by 0.9% for every 1% increase of the transferred land ratio. Family farms’ rented land through formal contracts have a 21.4% higher probability of adopting planting–breeding technology than family farms’ rented land through informal contracts. For every additional year of the rental contract duration, the possibility for family farms to replace chemical fertilizer with organic fertilizer, pesticides reduction, and integrated planting-breeding increase by 2.1%, 2.2%, and 1.3%, respectively. The results of this study can guide policy makers with further regulating land transfer behavior, guide family farms with signing formal lease contracts, and extending the duration of lease contracts, improving the cultivated land protection behavior of family farms.
Highlights
Cultivated land is an important resource that human beings depend on all the time and plays an extremely significant role in national food security, rural economic development, and ecological environment [1]
The results show that the formal land transfer contracts promote family farms’ cultivated land protection and quality improvement behavior (CLPQIB), which is consistent with the result of Zhang et al [30] that renting land via formal contracts would facilitate farmers with protecting the land quality
The results show that family farms signing a rental contract with longer duration are more willing to apply CLPQIT, which is similar to the findings of Vu et al [53] that perceive with regard to the addition in duration of agricultural land management rights that can stimulate farmers to invest in organic fertilizer and soil and water conservation
Summary
Cultivated land is an important resource that human beings depend on all the time and plays an extremely significant role in national food security, rural economic development, and ecological environment [1]. Cultivated land protection and quality improvement have become a hot spot of global concern in recent years considering national food security, social security, and environmental conservation. As a major agricultural country in the world, the Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection and quality improvement of cultivated land. As early as 2015, the Chinese government put forward the strategy of “storing grain in the land and storing grain in the technology” and proposed to build 53 million hectares of high standard farmland by 2020 to ensure national food security [6]. In 2017, the Ministry of Agriculture issued the Action Plan for the Protection and Improvement of Cultivated Land Quality [3], which put forward measures such as cultivated land quality improvement and soil fertility cultivation and carried out pilot projects in different regions. Application of organic fertilizers, pesticides reduction, integrated planting-breeding, green control technology, deep tillage and rotations, planting green manure, straw return, rational use of agricultural film, etc. [7,8]
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