| As an important means of production in the agricultural sector,chemical fertilizer is the main force to promote the rapid growth of grain output and agriculture.The growth of China’s agricultural productivity is highly dependent on the use of chemical fertilizer.However,excessive application of chemical fertilizer leads to serious environmental externalities,which is an important problem for China’s agricultural sustainable development.With the increasing scarcity of cultivated land resources and the decline of soil fertility caused by excessive chemical fertilizer,the intensive use of land in an environmentally and economically sustainable way has become more and more important.Avoiding the damage of excessive application of chemical fertilizer to agricultural production capacity and reducing the use of chemical fertilizer have become an important content of agricultural cleaner production and high-quality development.The main body of agricultural production and operation in China is farmers.How to induce small farmers to implement reduction is the focus of China’s agricultural reduction policy adjustment.The Chinese government has realized that the excessive use of chemical fertilizer will lead to the deterioration of the ecological environment,and has issued a number of policies to reverse this situation,strive to improve the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use and reduce the use of chemical fertilizer.From 2015 onward,the Ministry of Agriculture issued“Action Plan for Zero Growth of Fertilizer Use”which aimed at stopping the growth in fertilizer use by 2020 without reducing food production.The Central Document No.1 also focused on the reduction of chemical fertilizer for 7 years.To a certain extent,it promoted farmers to adopt the chemical fertilizer reduction actions such as soil testing formula,organic fertilizer,high efficiency controlled release fertilizer and professional fertilizer service,so as to realize the adjustment of traditional fertilization structure and fertilization mode.Based on the macro and micro evaluation of fertilizer application rate and utilization efficiency,the academic community studies the fertilization behavior of farmers from the perspective of national macroeconomic development and farmers’ microeconomic motivation.Most of the existing studies regard farmers’ fertilizer application behavior as a simple technical or economic problem,and do not consider the social situation of rural relations in China where farmers’ fertilizer application behavior occurs.Farmers’ fertilizer application behavior is not only a simple economic and technical behavior,but also a social behavior subject to the influence of the external environment,The study of farmers’ Fertilization behavior embedded in the relationship society is more in line with the actual situation of rural China.In this context,from the perspective of farmers,to explore the micro logic of the social embedding mechanism of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction behavior is the key to solve the problem of non-point source pollution caused by excessive application of chemical fertilizer in the process of grain production.It is of great significance to control soil degradation and realize the sustainable development of agriculture.In order to explore the embedding mechanism of fertilizer reduction behavior of grain planting farmers,based on previous research,this paper constructs the socialized driving mechanism of fertilizer reduction behavior of grain planting farmers by using responsible environmental behavior theory,social learning theory,social embeddedness theory and structural hole theory.Based on the field survey data of 1011 randomly sampled corn and rice farmers in Tieling,Shenyang,Fuxin and Panjin,Liaoning Province,and using Heckman two-step method,PSM,seemingly unrelated regression and other measurement methods,from the embedding mechanism of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction,the embedding mechanism formed by environmental literacy and the socialization path of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction,combined with the research conclusions,this paper puts forward countermeasures and suggestions.This paper consists of eight chapters,and the core content can be summarized into two parts:The first part is the theoretical analysis.Firstly,it analyzes the driving mechanism of farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior,and uses the theory of responsible environmental behavior to analyze the impact of environmental literacy on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior.Secondly,it analyzes the formation mechanism of farmer’ environmental literacy,and analyzes the impact of social embeddedness on farmers’ environmental literacy by using social learning theory.Finally,it analyzes the social embeddedness mechanism of farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior,analyzes the influence mechanism of social embeddedness,environmental literacy and farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior by using social embeddedness theory and structural hole theory,and constructs the decision-making framework of farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior according to the theoretical analysis.The second part is the empirical analysis.Based on the survey data,the C-D production function is used to measure the economic application of chemical fertilizer as the judgment basis of chemical fertilizer reduction.Based on the quantification and description of social embeddedness and environmental literacy by using the scale and mathematical measurement tools,an econometric model is established to test the theoretical analysis.Firstly,using Heckman’s two-stage model and propensity score matching(PSM)to control the sample selection deviation,this paper empirically analyzes the effects of structural embedding and relational embedding on the choice of chemical fertilizer overuse behavior and the degree of chemical fertilizer overuse,and carries out robustness test and heterogeneity analysis of farmers of different sizes.Secondly,ols model is used to analyze the impact of social embeddedness on farmers’ environmental literacy,and quasi uncorrelated regression and two-stage least squares(2SLS)are used for robustness test and endogenous test.Finally,using the bootstrap multiple intermediary effect test model to analyze the socialization realization path between social embeddedness,environmental literacy and farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior,and carry out the robust test and endogenous test to obtain the socialization path and reduction effect of fertilizer reduction.The main findings of this paper are as follows:First,the proportion and degree of excessive application of chemical fertilizer by grain planting farmers in Liaoning Province are high,and the agricultural reduction needs to be further promoted.By calculating the economic application amount of chemical fertilizer of1011 grain planting farmers,it is found that chemical fertilizer has a significant positive impact on the yield of corn and rice,and the production elasticity is 0.09 and 0.075 respectively.In the process of grain production in Liaoning Province,the average actual application amount of chemical fertilizer is 55.04 kg / mu,the optimal economic application amount is 40.40 kg / mu,the average excessive application amount of grain planting farmers is 14.64 kg / mu,and the average excessive application degree of chemical fertilizer is36.24%.There are 856 grain growers applying excessive chemical fertilizer,accounting for84.67% of the total sample.The degree of excessive application of chemical fertilizer is at the medium level as a whole.Second,social embeddedness has a significant effect on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior.Social embeddedness is beneficial to farmer’ fertilizer reduction behavior,but the effects of structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness on farmers’ fertilizer reduction choice and reduction results are different.Structural embeddedness not only improves the possibility of farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer,but also greatly increases the degree of chemical fertilizer reduction.Relationship intensity and relationship density only improve the possibility of farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer to a certain extent,but they can not increase the degree of chemical fertilizer reduction.Relationship quality not only significantly improves the possibility of farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer,but also greatly increases their degree of chemical fertilizer reduction.Structural embeddedness has stronger fertilizer reduction effect than relational embeddedness.Compared with the “strong ties”,the“weak ties” can better promote farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior.From the perspective of heterogeneity of different land scales: network difference and network scale can improve the possibility of small farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer,while the network height can significantly increase the degree of chemical fertilizer reduction;Network level can improve the possibility of scale farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer,while the network difference and network scale can increase the degree of chemical fertilizer reduction.The development of vertical and horizontal social embeddedness will help to realize the reduction of chemical fertilizer for small-scale farmers and large-scale farmers respectively.Relationship embeddedness can improve the possibility of small farmers choosing to reduce the application of chemical fertilizer.Relationship intensity and relationship density have no significant impact on the reduction degree of chemical fertilizer of all scale farmers.Relationship quality can significantly increase the reduction degree of chemical fertilizer of all scale farmers.The development of quality-oriented society embeddedness is suitable for the reduction of chemical fertilizer of different scale farmers.Third,social embeddedness has a significant impact on the formation of farmers’ environmental literacy,but the positive effects of different dimensions of social embeddedness on farmers’ environmental literacy are different.From the perspective of structural embeddedness,structural embeddedness has a significant positive impact on environmental literacy,but network differences and network scale focus on the impact on objective environmental literacy such as environmental knowledge and environmental skills,while network height focuses on the impact on subjective environmental literacy such as environmental cognition and environmental attitude.From objective environmental literacy to subjective environmental literacy,the influence effect of network difference and network scale is gradually weakened,and the influence effect of network height is gradually strengthened.From the perspective of relationship embeddedness,relationship quality has a significant positive impact on environmental literacy,and relationship intensity and relationship density only have no significant impact on environmental attitude and environmental cognition.With the relationship depth process from embeddedness form to embeddedness content and then to emotional embeddedness,the comprehensive impact of relationship embeddedness on environmental literacy presents a psychological change from the transmission of knowledge and skill information to cognition and attitude.Fourth,social embeddedness not only has direct fertilizer reduction effect,but also has indirect fertilizer reduction effect through environmental literacy,but the impact effects of different dimensions of social embeddedness are different.From the perspective of decomposition of fertilizer reduction effect,the direct effect of social embeddedness on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior is greater than the indirect effect,and the direct effect and indirect effect of structural embeddedness on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior are greater than relational embeddedness,showing the effect decomposition characteristics of direct effect and indirect effect.From the reduction effect of environmental literacy,environmental skills,environmental cognition and environmental attitude have a significant impact on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior,while environmental knowledge has no significant impact on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior.From the perspective of the mediating effect of environmental literacy,the mediating effect of environmental skills in social embeddedness on farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior is significant,while the mediating effect of environmental knowledge is not significant.Environmental skills are the core mediating factor of the socialization path of fertilizer reduction.From the perspective of chemical fertilizer reduction path,there are three socialized reduction paths: technology embeddedness,cognitive embeddedness and emotional embeddedness.Specifically,network difference,network scale,network height and relationship quality have three paths to realize fertilizer reduction through environmental skills,environmental cognition and environmental attitude.Relationship intensity have two paths to realize fertilizer reduction through environmental skills and environmental cognition.Relationship density have two paths to realize fertilizer reduction through environmental skills and environmental attitude.This paper studies the enlightenment to the construction of social network,the form of farmers’ education,the mode of agricultural production and the sustainable reduction of agriculture:1)The government should build an information exchange platform with rural social relations network as the core to cultivate farmers’ environmental literacy and the endogenous driving force of fertilizer reduction.Strengthen the construction of embedded structure and embedded quality of social network,and improve the utilization rate of social network resources;2)Pay attention to the transformation of the content and form of objective literacy such as agricultural technology training,from focusing on the teaching of theoretical knowledge of fertilization technology to paying attention to the guidance and practice of practical fertilization technology,establish the embedding mechanism of external farmers’ education channels and local rural social networks,explore the effective embedding form of external environmental education in rural society,and strengthen the publicity of agricultural ecological protection;3)On the basis of continuous large-scale operation,promote the socialization of agricultural production and deepen the reduction effect of agricultural division of labor;4)Formulate a more targeted socialized reduction path,build an economic reduction path of chemical fertilizer reduction compensation system,and improve the agricultural risk management system.The possible innovations of this paper are as follows: first,this paper puts the chemical fertilizer reduction behavior of grain planting farmers into the social structure,discusses the decision-making mechanism and internal logic of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction behavior from the perspective of social embeddedness,and breaks through the analytical thinking of single economy followed by previous studies.Moreover,from the dual embeddedness perspective of structural embeddedness and relationship embeddedness,this paper analyzes the embedding mechanism of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction behavior decision-making,reveals the difference in the impact of “weak ties” and “strong ties” on farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction behavior,expands the research perspective of farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction,and forms a powerful supplement to the existing literature on farmers’ chemical fertilizer reduction and social embeddedness.It has some innovation in the research perspective.Secondly,based on the theories of social embeddedness and social learning,this paper constructs the logical framework of “social embeddedness-environmental literacy-chemical fertilizer reduction” from three aspects: the driving mechanism of chemical fertilizer reduction of environmental literacy,the formation mechanism of environmental literacy of social embeddedness and the social embeddedness mechanism of chemical fertilizer reduction,It abandons the previous fragmented analysis of fertilizer reduction from a single dimension of social embeddedness and environmental literacy,enriches the socialized explanation of farmers’ fertilizer reduction behavior,and puts forward the socialized path of agricultural reduction from the perspective of social economics.It has some innovation in the research content.Thirdly,in the measurement of core variables,this paper measures structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness from the macro perspective of network length,width and height and the micro interactive perspective of human body,psychology and content.In the robust setting of measurement model,Heckman model and PSM are used to avoid sample selection errors,and seemingly unrelated regression and instrumental variable method are used to avoid equation errors and endogenous errors,which not only reduces the estimation errors of the impact of social embeddedness on fertilizer reduction behavior and environmental literacy,but also helps to correct the policy guidance path of fertilizer reduction behavior,and has some innovation in research methods. |
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