The Impact of Agricultural Machinery Socialization Services on the Scale of Land Operation: Evidence from Rural China

Abstract

The aims of this study were to analyze in depth the impact of agricultural machinery socialization services on the scale of land operation and to examine whether agricultural machinery socialization services can effectively alleviate the constraints faced by the scale of land operation. Accordingly, a systematic theoretical analysis and derivation of a farmer production model were first conducted to show that the adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services by farmers alleviated the financial, technical, and labor constraints they faced and facilitated the expansion of the farming scale. Subsequently, the OLS model, three-stage least squares, seemingly uncorrelated Biprobit association model, and Probit model were used based on survey data of maize farmers in 13 Chinese provinces in 2019. The endogeneity of simultaneous decision-making between farmers’ adoption of farm machinery socialization services and operation scale was assessed. Then, we empirically tested the effects of agricultural machinery socialization services on the operation scale under different part-time situations and terrain conditions. The empirical study shows that there is a significant contribution of farmers’ adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services to the scale of land operation. The adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services by purely agricultural household groups has a more significant effect on increasing the scale of land management. Moreover, the adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services significantly increases the scale of land management only among farmers on flat land as compared to farmers on sloping land. The research results help to dissect the relationship between agricultural machinery socialization services and operation scale and provide insights for developing agricultural machinery socialization service systems and expanding operation scale.