Picking agriculture is a form of leisure agriculture based on the concept of traditional garden. Due to their unique layout and construction style, picking gardens have different attractive elements, including sightseeing, leisure, entertainment, crop production, and crop picking. However, despite its increasing importance, there is no systematic research on price elasticity or price substitution elasticity of production factors in picking gardens. To fill this gap, we surveyed 308 farmers in five districts of Beijing and employed a translog cost function to compare the impact of operation patterns on peach and cherry production cost by estimating elasticities of substitution between and among inputs. We found that own-price elasticity of all input factors was negative, while substitution relationships existed between labor and land, labor and fertilizer, fertilizer and manure, and manure and pesticide. This indicates that Beijing’s agricultural sector is labor intensive, while fertilizer and pesticide are scarcely used.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.