Perceptions, Risk Attitude and Organic Fertilizer Investment: Evidence from Rice and Banana Farmers in Guangxi, China

Abstract

Overuse of chemical fertilizer has led to severe land degradation and environmental pollution in China. Switching to organic fertilizer may improve soil quality and reduce pollution, which is meaningful to the sustainable development of Chinese agriculture. This study examines how farmers’ perceptions and risk preference affect their organic fertilizer investment using a representative rural household survey from Guangxi, a major agricultural region in China. Tobit and double-hurdle models are used to empirically test their impacts on organic fertilizer adoption and investment. An ordinary least squares model is used to regress chemical fertilizer use on the same set of explanatory variables to compare and contrast farmers’ different fertilizer investment behaviors. It is found that both organic fertilizer perceptions and risk attitude significantly affect organic fertilizer investment. Perceived yield-increasing and quality-improving effects encourage organic fertilizer investment, while perceived cost increases discourage it. Moreover, risk-averse farmers are more likely to invest in organic fertilizers. Most of the perceptions affecting organic fertilizer investment have an opposite impact on chemical fertilizer investment, which suggests substitutability between organic and chemical fertilizer. Interventions that aim to improve farmers’ perceptions of organic fertilizer and illustrate its risk-reduction effect could be effective in promoting organic fertilizer use, which can help achieve China’s sustainable development of agriculture.

Welfare Impact of Organic Fertilizer Adoption: Empirical Evidence From Nigeria

“…This suggests that poor soil quality can drive the adoption of organic fertilizers. This is in line with the findings that adopters of organic fertilizers generally perceived their soil quality to be poorer than nonadopters and are more willing to adopt organic fertilizers to improve soil quality (Chen et al, 2018) which can significantly increase crop output (Olagunju et al, 2021). The result further reveals that organic fertilizers are more likely to be adopted on flatland compared with sloppy land areas.…”

“…From this result, one can conclude that the gain from adopting organic fertilizers is not immediate but beneficial in the long term. This is in line with the perception that the gain from adopting organic fertilizer is slow (Khaliq et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2018).…”

Organic Fertilizer Adoption, Household Food Access, and Gender-Based Farm Labor Use: Empirical Insights from Northern Ghana

“…Following the strands of literature on farm technology in general (e.g., Di Falco et al, 2011;Fuglei and Bosch, 1995;Manthenge et al, 2014;Sheferaw et al, 2014;Tambo and Wünscher, 2017;Teklewold et al, 2013) and specifically, organic fertilizer adoption (e.g., Chen et al, 2018aChen et al, , 2018bMartey, 2018;Ullah et al, 2015;Waithaka et al, 2007), the survey also captured data on six categories of farmer background factors (explanatory variables). These moderator variables are farmer/household characteristics, resource constraints, and plot-specific factors.…”

Subsidy as An Economic Instrument for Environmental Protection: A Case of Global Fertilizer Use

“…It is known that any method adopted to improve food security, including increasing yields, will have to consider resource limitations and ecosystem sensitivity to changes, especially those related to essential nutrients [42,43]. Therefore, sustainable approaches, such as rapidly increasing the use of organic fertilizer and decreasing the use of inorganic fertilizer, must be well developed [44][45][46].…”