Abstract
Based on interviews with 695 smallholders in Jianghan Plain, this paper introduced the three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to analyze the agricultural production efficiency of conservation tillage adopters and explored the impact of environmental factors on agricultural production efficiency. The empirical results showed the following (1) Planting area, seed consumption, labor input, pesticide usage, chemical fertilizer usage, agricultural film usage were selected as input indicators, agricultural output was chosen as an output indicator, and the traditional DEA model was used to calculate the production efficiency of smallholders, and the agricultural production efficiency of smallholders was found to be at a low level. In addition, environmental and random factors both have significant impacts on efficiency, so they should be stripped. (2) After excluding environmental factors and random factors, the drop in pure technical efficiency of smallholders in the third stage was higher than the drop in scale efficiency when compared with the first stage. Moreover, the true technical efficiency was the main restricting factor for the agricultural production efficiency. (3) Educational level of smallholders, policy support, and information acquisition were the factors that affect the technical efficiency significantly. Improving the efficiency of agricultural production technology for smallholders requires strengthening rural basic education, improving subsidy policies for conservation agricultural technology, and establishing and improving rural information technology services.
Highlights
Agriculture in China has experienced rapid development during the past several decades.Every year huge amounts of chemical fertilizer and pesticides were put into farmland to guarantee the national grain production and effective supply of agricultural products [1]
Agricultural science and technology demonstration farms that used pesticide control techniques and deep tillage are vigorously constructed in Yicheng, with one of the largest parks taking up approximately 80 hm2, in which the use of fertilizer decreased by 10% annually during 2017–2019 [25].Jingshan is the birthplace of Chinese farming culture and unique production bases of high-quality rice
According to the agricultural conditions of the Jianghan Plain and a large number of literature references, the input and output variables are selected to measure agricultural productivity growth by data envelopment analysis (DEA) models, as shown in Table 1.six variables for DEA models are used as inputs: planting area, seed consumption, labor input, pesticide usage, chemical fertilizer usage, and agricultural film usage; while agricultural output is regarded as output
Summary
Agriculture in China has experienced rapid development during the past several decades. The motivation for this study is to estimate the agricultural production efficiency of smallholders who adopt different levels of conservation tillage and to explore the potential influencing factors of the above agricultural production efficiency. Technology, Fried et al proposed three-stage DEA model [15] In this model, the agricultural production efficiency of smallholders who adopted conservation is equated with technology adoption, external environmental variables, and random error. The three-stage DEA model has been widely used to calculate the true agricultural production efficiency due to its unique advantages in excluding the impacts from external environmental variables and random error. This paper uses the three-stage DEA model to evaluate the agricultural production technical efficiency level of different conservation tillage adopters by eliminating the interference of environmental factors and random factors and explores the impact of environmental variables on the above technical efficiency. The results are presented and discussed, and the last section draws conclusions and implications for policy
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