Ziyuan Kexue (Mar 2023)
Effects on efficiency improvement and poverty reduction of conservation tillage technology adoption by farming households in the Loess Plateau area
Abstract
[Objective] Conservation tillage technology, as a comprehensive technology beneficial to ecology, environment, and soil health of farmland, is an important tool to improve the quality of arable land and is related to sustainable agricultural development. [Methods] Based on 1268 questionnaires from maize farmers in the Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia regions of the Loess Plateau, after measuring agricultural production efficiency using a stochastic frontier (SFA) model, we used the endogenous transformation regression model (ESRM) to test the effect of farming households’ conservation tillage technology adoption on agricultural production efficiency and the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) model to estimate the effect of farming households’ conservation tillage technology adoption on income generation and poverty reduction. [Results] The results indicate that: (1) The adoption of conservation tillage technology can significantly improve the agricultural production efficiency of farm households, and on the basis of considering the counterfactual situation, the production efficiency of the farmers who adopted conservation tillage technology increased by 2.9% compared with those of the non-adopted farmer households. (2) Conservation tillage technology adoption had a robust positive contribution to the poverty reduction effect of farm household income increase, with a significant increase of 8.9% in per capita net household income for conservation tillage technology adopters compared to non-adopters, and the validity and reliability of the results were further verified using different matching methods of the propensity matching score (PSM). (3) Compared with the adoption of a single conservation tillage technology, the increase in productivity of farmers’ multiple combinations of conservation tillage technology adoption is more significant; compared with Gansu Province and Ningxia Province, farmers in Shaanxi Province have a more significant effect on increasing income and reducing poverty by adopting conservation tillage technology. [Conclusion] Arable land is the key to food production, and the government actively promotes conservation tillage technology and motivates farmers to adopt it, which not only helps to improve crop yields, save labor, increase agricultural productivity, improve economic benefits, and reduce poverty incidence, but also preserves water and fertilizer, improves soil structure, and protects the environment, which is an important guiding reference for the further promotion of conservation tillage technology.
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