Assessing Grain Productivity Coupled with Farmers’ Behaviors Based on the Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZ) Model

Abstract

This study presents a method that dynamically embeds constraints of farmers’ management and input levels to improve a traditional agro-ecological zones (AEZ) model to solve the problem of overestimation of grain production capacity. The proposed method is applied to Yuanjiang county in central China to evaluate the grain productivity of farmland and analyze its spatial distribution characteristics. Our results indicated that (1) The feasibility of the AEZ method coupled with farmers’ behavior had been verified, and the revised model can better improve the accuracy of the evaluation results. (2) Low-value areas of grain production potential are mainly distributed in the central region, high-value areas are mainly distributed in the southwest and northeast regions, and the spatial differentiation characteristics of production potential and total production capacity are the same. (3) The total grain productivity is 935,800 tons, and the total yield gap is 470,100 tons, which is 1.01 times the actual yield, indicating a large potential to increase grain production under the current technicality. The main contribution of this study is to propose a method to dynamically embed farmers’ behavioral factors into the traditional AEZ model, and apply this method to the actual farmland productivity evaluation in small-scale areas, which improves the reliability of the actual regional productivity evaluation results.

Keywords

• grain productivity capacity
• production potential
• AEZ model
• farmers’ behavior
• “non-grain”