The aging of farmers and its challenges for labor-intensive agriculture in China: A perspective on farmland transfer plans for farmers' retirement

Abstract

As a major labor-intensive agricultural producer globally, China is facing a rapidly aging farming population and a persistent exodus of young farmers. There are no clear answers to the questions of how China's labor-intensive agriculture will be shaped by these challenges and what future changes will occur. Exploring the agricultural practices of older farmers and the farmland transfer plans (FTPs) of farmers for retirement and the associated mechanisms is important for answering these questions. Thus, we construct an explanatory framework for FTPs using a nested structure consisting of factors at 3 levels, macrocontext, meso-region, and microindividual, and conduct an empirical study based on a field survey of two villages with specialized fruit and vegetable cultivation in China. The results demonstrate the negative effects of an aging farming population on labor-intensive agricultural production, returns, and risk resistance capacities. While macrolevel contextual characteristics in China determine the widespread psychological rejection of farming by the young generation, the interaction of objective factors, including their education level, jobs, wages and their family's agricultural resources and farming practices, shapes the individual heterogeneity in intergenerational farmland transfer plans; moreover, location and geography are among the core factors affecting the regional differences in FTPs. Finally, this paper envisions multiple possible trajectories of China's labor-intensive agriculture and the corresponding geographical patterns under the challenges of the aging of farmers.