Heterogeneous impacts of information technology adoption on pesticide and fertiliser expenditures: Evidence from wheat farmers in China*

Abstract

This study examines the impacts of mobile information technology adoption on agrochemical expenditures, using data collected from 551 wheat farmers in China. Unlike previous studies that analyse a homogeneous relationship between the adoption of information technologies and farm input use, in this study, an instrumental variable quantile regression approach is utilised to capture the heterogeneous impacts of smartphone use on pesticide and fertiliser expenditures. Findings reveal that smartphone use affects pesticide and fertiliser expenditures heterogeneously, and its impacts on pesticide expenditure are larger than those on fertiliser expenditure. Specifically, at the lowest 20th quantile, smartphone use significantly increases pesticide expenditure by 33 per cent and fertiliser expenditure by 18 per cent. However, at the higher 60th and 80th quantiles, smartphone use significantly decreases pesticide expenditure by 36-39 per cent and fertiliser expenditure by 14-19 per cent. Our findings suggest that guiding farmers' agrochemical usage behaviours through smartphone-based information intervention can be a practical strategy to help reduce the excessive usage of chemical pesticides and fertilisers and preserve the environment and human health.

Does the Application of ICTs Improve the Efficiency of Agricultural Carbon Reduction? Evidence from Broadband Adoption in Rural China

“…By looking into the direct impact of rural broadband adoption on ACRE and its related moderating effect, this study has generated a rich set of empirical findings. Firstly, based on the EKC hypothesis and considering the role of broadband adoption, our econometric results confirm the hypothesis that rural broadband adoption has a positive role in promoting agricultural carbon emissions reduction, supporting that which was reported in the literature [32,45,46]. Then, through further analysis of the mediation effect of land transfer and farmers' investment in production equipment on ACRE, we found that the positive effect of broadband adoption on ACRE was more obvious when land transfer rates are high.…”

“…Therefore, broadband adoption can promote green agricultural production and achieve a significant improvement in ACRE. In terms of the positive impact of broadband adoption on the agricultural environment, our results were consistent with those by Ma and Zheng [46].…”

“…Unfortunately, precision agriculture can only be adopted by farmers who have access to broadband due to the technological requirements [44]. In previous studies, Wang et al [45] and Ma and Zheng [46] found a significant correlation between Internet use and farmers' environmental behavior of reducing fertilizers and pesticides.…”

Does the Adoption of Mobile Internet Technology Promote Wheat Productivity? Evidence from Rural Farmers

“…Furthermore, let us describe U iA as the utility obtained by growers i from the adoption of MIT and U iN as the utility obtained from not adopting. Under this assumption, if the utility obtained from adopting the technology is larger than the utility of not adopting it, D * i = U iA − U iN > 0, and farmers usually adopt the technology [59][60][61][62][63]. Meanwhile, as these two utility values are unobservable, we could articulate them as function factors such as technical and farmer attributes in the latent variable model, as shown below:…”

Comparison of fertilizer use efficiency in grain production between developing countries and developed countries

“…Some agronomists have suggested that the substitution of chemical fertilizers with organic soil amendments (e.g. organic fertilizers and farm manure) can help mitigate the adverse effects of chemical fertilizer usage 9 . Therefore, reasonable uses of chemical fertilizer and improvements of its efficiency are practical issues to be investigated globally.…”