Recently, the relationship between agricultural machinery harvesting services accessed by farmers and cropland abandonment has been empirically analyzed by the researchers of the Agricultural Macro Strategy Team, Institute of Agricultural Economics and Development, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IAED, CAAS). The research was published online in Agriculture.

Cropland abandonment has already become an increasingly important issue in China since 2000 and has challenged and threatened to China's food security and agriculture sustainablility. Agricultural mechanization services is a special form to achieve the mechanized operation of part or all of the agricultural production links among rural areas in China, which can alleviate rural labor shortages, reduce agricultural production costs, and improve agricultural mechanization levels.

Acccording to the Survey for Agriculture and Rural Economy data collected by IAED and the extended regression models (i.e., the extended probit regression model and the extended interval regression model), this research found that agricultural machinery harvesting services accessed by farmers reduced the probability of cropland abandonment and the proportion of the area of abandoned cropland in farmers' contracted cropland area decreased by 18.5% and 20.3%, respectively. Moreover, the heterogeneity analysis results showed that farmers' access to agricultural machinery harvesting services significantly reduced cropland abandonment in small-scale groups, without elderly households, with non-agricultural income groups, and in the eastern region. This research also provides some policy implications for policymakers to reduce cropland abandonment in rural China.

The research was carried out by Dr. Wang Xiudong's group at IAED, CAAS. The research was funded by the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program (10-IAED-08-2022, 10-IAED-RC-04-2022) and the National Key Research and Development Project (2020YFD1001205-1).

Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12070901

By Han Xinru (hanxinru@caas.cn)