As participants and beneficiaries in the construction of beautiful rural countryside areas, peasant households can have an important impact on the performance of the new rural construction policies, ...their individual behaviors have become a much-studied topic in international rural studies. Starting from the concept of “put people first” and adopting the concept of a symbiotic system among peasant households, this study analyzes the elements, mechanisms, and operations of a peasant household symbiotic system in the process of rural settlement restructuring, taking Fengsi village in Chongqing, China as an example. Retaining traditional rural interpersonal relationship which takes lineal, collateral and terrain as the links, this study establishs a symbiotic relationship; that is, resources, benefits, and responsibility for environmental construction are shared. Accordingly, the spatial pattern developed into “the axis-line-distribution along the road”, which included one living-oriented functional group and three production-oriented functional groups. The one living-oriented functional group will be located at the junction of roads and rivers in the southeast of the village with three different types of peasant household, including the non-agricultural diversification type, the non-agricultural specialization type, and the part-time development type. The three production-oriented functional groups will situate along country roads in the middle and east of the village with three other different types of peasant household, including the agricultural diversification type, the agricultural specialization type, and the part-time development type. This study, therefore, provides theoretical support and methodological guidance for the construction of Chinese rural human settlements that are suitable for living in, convenient for employment, and pleasant to travel around.
•Rapid rural transition has triggered rural settlement restructuring.•Analyzes rural settlements restructuring based on the symbiosis theory.•A mutualistic symbiotic relationship existed in rural.•Rural settlements should be restructured into two kinds of functional groups.•Promoting the rural development of “put people first”.
In this paper, we comprehensively assess the differences in soil and water conservation tillage technology among different districts: Fenyang and Ji county of Shanxi province, Ansai and Jingbian ...county of Shaanxi province, and Zhenyuan and Jingchuan county in Gansu province. We use survey data of 1237 rural households of the Loess Plateau on their adoption of the core technology of soil and water conservation tillage (e.g., contour tillage, groove ridge planting, moderate or non-tillage, subsoiling, straw plowing, stubble mulching, plastic film covering). We use the bootstrap test to analyze peasant household horizontal and vertical differentiation directly impacting on soil and water conservation tillage technology adoption. Next, we test risk perception as the mediation role for technology adoption. Finally, we analyze the moderating effect of government subsidies, and government subsidy can compensate for possible risk losses and encourage farmers to adopt soil and water conservation tillage technology. The results are showed the following: (1) The horizontal and vertical differentiation of farmers have a significant positive impact on the adoption of soil and water conservation tillage technology. (2) In the context of horizontal differentiation, risk perception has a positive mediating effect on the adoption of contour tillage, groove ridge planting, moderate or non-tillage, straw plowing, and plastic film covering technology; in the adoption of subsoiling technology, the mediating effect of risk perception differs because of the size of the government subsidies; in the adoption of stubble mulching technology, the mediating effect of risk perception is not significant. In the context of vertical differentiation, risk perception has a positive mediating effect in the adoption of contour tillage, groove ridge planting and straw plowing; and in the adoption of moderate or non-tillage, subsoiling, and stubble mulching, the mediating effect of risk perception is not significant. (3) In the context of horizontal differentiation, the moderating effect of government subsidies is not significant in the adoption of contour tillage, moderate or non-tillage, straw plowing, and plastic film covering; the moderating effect of government subsidies is significant in the adoption of groove ridge planting and subsoiling. In the context of vertical differentiation, the moderating effect of a government subsidies is not significant in the adoption of contour tillage, groove ridge planting, and straw plowing technology; the moderating effect of a government subsidies is significant in the application of plastic film covering technology.
•Influence of peasant household differentiation on technology adoption is studied.•Impact of career differentiation and income differentiation are considered.•Risk perception plays a mediating role on technology adoption.•Government subsidies play a moderating role on adoption behavior.
In a long historical period, the social network based on kinship and neighborhood played an important role in the rural society of China. China's rural revitalization policy has brought rural ...development into a new era. In this research, we have explored whether the characteristics of the traditional rural social network have changed in the current period, and whether and how the social network, as an informal system, affects peasant households' land use decisions. We used social network analysis to portray the characteristics of peasant households' social network and adopted network autocorrelation analysis to test whether the social network affects peasant households' land use decision-making, and finally employed regression models to revel the mechanism among the social network, livelihoods, and peasant households' land use decision-making. Our research results showed that the social network of peasant households based on kinship and neighborhood was featured by subgroups and small-world phenomenon, indicating that the pattern of traditional rural social relationships has not changed. Besides, our results also revealed that the social network influences peasant households' land use decision-making by making it more similar, that is, the decision-making presented peer effects. In peer effects, the influence of the neighborhood network was greater than that of the kinship network, and when the social relationship reached the fourth-order, peer effects would no longer exist. Furthermore, the social network can not only regulate the simplification and food-crop preference of planting structure caused by livelihood changes but also directly reduces the food crop proportion and increases land investment intensity. Our research results emphasize the importance of using peasant households' social networks to guide land use in the process of rural revitalization to better implement agricultural policies.
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•The impact of the social network on peasant households' land use decision-making (PHLD) was identified.•Multiplex relationship network of peasant households was constructed.•The social network significantly affected PHLD.•The impact of the social network on PHLD ceased when social relationships reached the fourth order.•The neighborhood relationship had a greater impact on PHLD than the kinship.
The widespread and scattered smallholders in China have a profound impact on agricultural production in response to climate change. Using the data of peasant household obtained from survey and the ...factor coefficients collected in Shaanxi Province of China, the carbon footprint (CF) of farmer’s agricultural production (FAP) was estimated by a multi system boundary scenarios approach to judge the contribution of FAP for climate change reasonably. The results showed that the agricultural activities’ carbon footprint (ACF), farm’s carbon footprint (FCF) and product’s carbon footprint (PCF) of wheat, maize, rice and apple crops in FAP exhibited significant differences in four scenarios, and the positive climate externalities of FAP rely on its own duality of carbon effect. Distribution structure of ACF in FAP subsystem under the four scenarios indicated that allocation of emission responsibility has a significant impact on the carbon effect of FAP. The categories of key source in FAP were greenhouse gas emissions from heterotrophic soil respiration in agro-ecosystem (AE), chemical fertilizer in raw material production system (RMPS), diesel or gasoline in RMPS and agricultural production system and direct N2O emissions in AE, and the key sink categories were carbon sequestration from crop biomass and cropland management in AE. Therefore, the ecological benefits should be embedded in the economic benefit-oriented agricultural production policy objectives, in order to reduce the dependence on high energy-consuming industrial products in FAP, optimize the agricultural industrial structure and guide farmers from cleaner production behavior. Besides, the uncertainties of CF accounting method drop significantly which we improved by integrating carbon-nitrogen cycle into life cycle assessment theory.
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•Carbon-nitrogen cycle included in life cycle assessment to improve the system boundary.•Cross-contrast analysis used on carbon footprints in farmer’s agricultural production.•Positive climate externalities of agriculture depend on the duality of carbon effect.•It has a great mitigation potential to guide farmers’ cleaner production behavior.•Both economy and environment consideration cost-effectively optimizes policy objectives.
The objective of this paper is to mainstream gender in agroecology, using VIDA's coffee systems as a case study. Data were collected through a mixed, participatory approach, combining qualitative ...(participant observation, interviews, workshops) and quantitative methods (a census of 24 men and 26 women). Results reveal gender differences across environmental, economic, social, and political dimensions. Women prioritize plant diversity, while men focus on coffee varieties and farm conditions. Both sexes emphasize economic and social sustainability, with women advocating for greater access to resources and benefits. VIDA has a gender-parity leadership promoting territorial defense and youth visibility to mitigate outmigration.
Using typical counties in the Yimeng Mountain area of northern China as an example, this paper analyzed the household and agricultural input characteristics of different types of peasant households ...using survey data from 262 farm households. The target minimization of the total absolute deviations (MOTAD) model was applied to determine the optimal combinations in the allocation of agricultural input factors and production for different types of at-risk peasant households to obtain the ideal agricultural income. The relevant results are twofold. (1) The agricultural input behaviors of different types of peasant households vary significantly. The highest levels of agricultural land, labor, and yield-increasing and labor-saving inputs included I part-time peasant households (
), followed by full-time peasant households (
), while the input levels of II part-time peasant households (
) and non-agricultural peasant households (
) with higher levels of non-agricultural employment gradually decreased. In general, an increase in peasant households' part-time employment revealed an inverted U-shaped trend in the agricultural input level, with a trajectory of
>
>
>
. (2) The current agricultural inputs and production combinations of different types of peasant households have room for improvement. It is necessary to adjust agricultural inputs and optimize production combinations to obtain target incomes. Overall, all types of peasant households must streamline labor inputs and increase capital inputs, except for
, for which capital inputs should be reduced. Following optimization, economic crops gradually replace grain crops, and the optimal agricultural incomes of peasant households will be improved. The study results provide practical policy insights for reducing agricultural production risks and improving agricultural production incomes.
The evaluation of farmers’ satisfaction is very important in the planning, construction, and management of ecological restoration in coal mining areas. Taking coal mining areas with high ground-water ...level in China (Jining, Huainan, and Yongxia) as examples, this study set up a farmers’ satisfaction with ecological restoration performance evaluation index system in coal mining areas. We used the questionnaire survey method, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method and the IPA to evaluate the degree of farmers’ satisfaction. The results show that the overall farmers’ satisfaction score was 3.692, which corresponded to “basically satisfied.” The ecological performance satisfaction score was the highest, which translated to “relatively satisfied,” and the economic performance satisfaction score was the lowest, which indicated “basically satisfied.” The evaluation of social performance satisfaction was “basically satisfied.” The IPA revealed that biodiversity, land productivity, and regional farmers’ income in the indicator layer were located in the high importance–low satisfaction quadrant and urgently needed to be improved. According to the results of IPA analysis, we put forward the strategy respectively from the policies improvement, supervision and management, public participation, technology innovation, and functional transformation. The results can provide theoretical guidance and practical reference for ecological restoration and ecological civilization construction, and contribute to the sustainable development of ecological environment in the coal mining areas.
This study investigates the relationship between Chinese farmers' propensity to adopt environment-friendly practices and their membership in cooperatives. Based on data collected in 2021 from the ...Fujian China Household Survey, the Endogenous Switching Probit model (ESP) is applied to account for unobserved factors that could simultaneously affect farmers' cooperative membership and their willingness to adopt environment-friendly practices. First, the results indicate that a cooperative membership has a positive impact on the level of farmers' interest in green production practices. Second, there is evidence of some heterogeneity (based on both observable and unobservable characteristics) in the impact of cooperative membership; the higher the farmers' capital returns, the more prominent the role of cooperatives in guiding these farmers. Third, participation in cooperatives is conducive to raising farmers' interest in green production. The overall conclusion is that a cooperative membership raises the Chinese farmers’ willingness to adopt environment-friendly practices.
With increases in urbanization, agricultural production space is facing a series of problems, such as limited spatial development, loss of development entities, and difficulties in transformation, ...posing a huge challenge to national food security and sustainable rural development. The peasant household, as the main body in agricultural production space, plays a key role in solving human–land conflicts and achieving revitalization. In this article, we analyze the evolution characteristics of agricultural production space under the influence of peasant household behavior in the Yanhe River Basin from 1995 to 2018, and construct a spatial control system for agricultural production based on peasant household behavior guidance. Our conclusions are: (1) the agricultural production space in the Yanhe River Basin presents three major evolutionary characteristics, namely a reduction in spatial scale, a shift in the center of gravity of spatial distribution to the downstream, and a transformation of the spatial form from fragmented to regular; (2) the production input and production management behaviors of peasant households dominate the evolution of agricultural production space, while resource utilization behavior is an indirect influencing factor; moreover, peasant household behaviors are also influenced by conditions such as soil and location in agricultural production space; and (3) a control method system of “management and control basis + management and control implementation + management and control guarantee” has been formed through research, and targeted guidance has been given to peasant household behavior based on three levels of agricultural production zones and four types of rural areas. The research on zoning classification results can provide scientific guidance for the precise management of agricultural production space in the Yanhe River Basin, and the management and control method system can also provide a theoretical reference for the sustainable development path of agricultural production space.
For rural communities in poor countries to develop, farmers need money to invest in their farms. However, with limited assets of their own and poor conditions for obtaining loans, the farmers’ ...operations suffer. This study explores how farmers’ chances of obtaining a bank loan are related to the social capital that they receive from their cooperative membership. The data originated from 743 farmers in Fujian province, China, and was analyzed with the help of the instrumental variable probit (IV-probit) regression model. The results show that (a) cooperative members have a higher chance of obtaining a bank loan compared to non-members; (b) cooperative membership positively influences the chances of obtaining a bank loan for farmers with no acquaintances in banks and government or off-farm work; and (c) among farmers with higher financial knowledge, cooperative members are more likely to receive a bank loan than non-members are. Therefore, the conclusion provides empirical evidence for the financial function of cooperatives to farmers. The findings are especially relevant for cooperatives in developing countries, and they call for farmers and cooperatives to establish cooperative financial institutions. Moreover, the research conclusions point out the direction for further improving the financial effect of cooperatives.
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