Study On The Intensive Management Of Agriculture:Farmer-households Perspective

China is a country of a large population sharing limited land area. Arable land is even much scarce. With the development of industrialization and urbanization, a great stretch of arable land is being and will be turned into construction land, serving the development of modernization. The growing scarcity of arable land resources, coupled with continuing population growth, has tightened the relationship between human and land. In such circumstances, the path for China’s agricultural modernization demands for higher intensive management of farming. Farmer-households as the basic decision-making unit of rural micro-economic organization, play an important role in agricultural production and farming management. The input of production funds, capital goods, science and technology has to be via farmer-household, speak less of the labor factor. In this way, farmers’ decision-making process their behavioral will inevitably affect intensive farming and agriculture production. So there’s great significance for us to study agriculture management from farmers and farmer-households perspectives.Data applied in this paper are from a field survey in which I participated in person during July and August,2010, aided financially by the State Social Science Fund. The survey questionnaires were designed to research on the development of intensive farming in Anhui Province. We chose three areas located in north, middle and south of Anhui respectively. The number of households that were asked adds up to over two hundreds. Apart from these field data, other data resources are also employed in the paper.Based on field survey data and related information, farmer-households’intensive farming situation and problems are firstly discussed in third part. From the current situation, it is not difficult to find the fact of the failure in the extent to which intensive farming developed, farmers reluctance to enlarge production and inadequate use of agricultural sci-tech. Secondly, methods and theories of econometrics, households economics and behavioral science disciplines, such as logistic regression model, farmer models, the theory of planed behavior, will be applied to analyze the factors that affect how farmer-households make decision and behave, furthermore the farmers’behaviors in increasing the input of funds, and sci-tech, and in loaning from banks.In the end, four conclusions can be drawn from above analysis. First, due to the constraints of lower farm income, most of farmers are unwilling to continue agriculture production, not to mention turning to intensive farming. Second, the factors that affect the willingness of farmers’intensive farming behavior include three aspects, the farmers’resource endowment (land, capital, labor, etc.) characteristics, and the economic, social and institutional environment where farmers are facing, including farmers’cognitions of environment and things. Third, due to the double restriction of low income and little access to external funding sources, the development of capital-intensive farming is restricted. Fourth, part of farmers show great demand for agricultural technologies, however, are confined to low self educational level, and limited financial conditions and lack of access to information, thereby decreasing sci-tech input. Finally, on the basis of above empirical research and learning from foreign experience, in the end are the author’s thinking and recommendations on households’intensive farming, expecting to contribute to the development of intensive agriculture and its modernization.