Divergence between Willingness and Behavior of Farmers to Purchase Socialized Agricultural Services: From a Heterogeneity Perspective of Land Scale

Abstract

The low-level dilemma of farmers’ Socialized Agricultural Services (SAS) purchases is a realistic problem facing the construction of socialized service systems in China’s major grain-producing areas. Existing research lacks the necessary attention on the decision-making mechanism of farmers’ purchases of SAS, resulting in a large gap between theoretical research and real-world problems. Based on the data of 638 households in China’s main grain-producing areas, this paper empirically analyzes the influence mechanism of heterogeneous land scale on deviation between farmers’ willingness and behavior to purchase SAS, and discusses the heterogeneity of the influence mechanism under different production links. The findings indicate that the degree of divergence between farmers’ willingness to purchase SAS and their behavior is large. (1) There is a significant threshold effect of land scale on the degree of divergence between farmers’ willingness and behavior to purchase SAS, and the threshold value is ten mu. The increase in land scale will significantly enlarge the divergence between small-scale farmers’ purchase willingness and behavior. However, it will significantly reduce the divergence between large-scale farmers’ purchase willingness and behavior. (2) From the demand side, household income and health will significantly reduce the divergence among farmers of different business sizes. Family burden and land fragmentation are essential factors affecting the degree of divergence of small-scale farmers, while education and the value of their own machinery significantly affect the degree of divergence of large-scale farmers. From the supply side, whether there are local suppliers and their matching degree with farmers significantly reduces the divergence among farmers of different business scales. However, small-scale farmers are more sensitive to the price and quality of agricultural services, while large-scale farmers have higher requirements for the degree of regulation of supplying agents. (3) There is heterogeneity in the influence mechanisms of divergence between farmers’ willingness to purchase SAS and their behavior under different product segments. In addition, our findings highlight how to realize the transformation from declarative preference to explicit preference in promoting farmers’ purchases of SAS.

Assessing the Ability of Agricultural Socialized Services to Promote the Protection of Cultivated Land among Farmers

“…The rapid development of agricultural socialized services has given farmers access to lower-cost and higher-level services. By outsourcing services, farmers gain access to the superior resources of service organizations [46], reduce agricultural production costs and weak labor constraints [47,48], and can therefore promote cultivated land quality conservation with optimal allocation. In terms of service provision, agricultural socialized services share the risk of investment in technology or equipment and improve resource utilization by integrating the needs of dispersed farmers, who have the opportunity to obtain better service with lower input [49].…”

Can agricultural mechanization services narrow the income gap in rural China?

“…Referring to relevant research [ [34] , [35] , [36] ], we mainly selected individual characteristic variables such as gender, age, education, party member, and health status, as well as family characteristic variables such as family labor ratio, off-farm labor ratio, land size, machine assets, government subsidies and gift expenditures as control variables. In addition, this paper also added dummy variables of provinces to control the effect at the regional level.…”

Deviation between willingness and actual behavior regarding community participation in protected areas: A case study in Shengjin lake national nature reserve in China

“…Generally, willingness predicts and leads to the realization of the corresponding actual behavior of an individual; however, many previous studies have confirmed that there is a deviation between willingness and behavior in real life, such as in commodity consumption , services purchases (Qu et al, 2022), e-commerce adoption (Li et al, 2020), and land transfer (Zhang et al, 2020a). This deviation has been further identified in the field of pro-environmental behaviors such as green consumption (Rausch and Kopplin, 2021;Wang et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2022;Qiu et al, 2022), green agriculture (Guo et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021), garbage classification (Kuang and Lin, 2021;Zhang et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022), bird conservation donation (Eylering et al, 2022), and renewable energy development support (Fang et al, 2021).…”