Research On Chinese Farmers’ Maize Varieties, Technology Adoption And The Potential Of Increasing Production

The food security strategy of "storing grain in technology" requires generalizing the fine breed and scientific cultivation and management technology, following the way of improving the yield. Farmers’ variety and technology adoption behavior has important influence on the yield of maize in micro-level. Comparing with the natural science, which use the experimental data to study the differences of yield potential from purpose of output, this paper base on the survey data to analysis the actual situation, influencing factors and effect of leading variety and main technologies used in China, which has important practical significance to improve the level of food security.Through the overview of Chinese maize production after 1949, this paper reviewed changes of the production layout and analyzed its reasonability by using the agriculture comparative advantage index and rank correlation coefficient. After understanding the overall situation and production layout, the sample provinces are determined considering the representativeness and the feasibility for the survey. On the basis of this, we (1) explored the situation of farmers’ maize variety and main technologies used; (2) studied farmers’ willingness to pay and preferences for summer maize varieties traits of maize by the random parameters model and latent class model; (3) analyzed the influencing factors of farmers’ technologies adoption through an example of the Trichogramma to control ostriniae Technology by the binary logit model; (4) calculated the yield-improving effects of the "One Increase and Four Change" Technology from matching the related variables influencing yield of maize with the individual characteristics of farmers by the method of Propensity Score Matching; (5) discussed the influences on yield of maize from the leading variety and main technologies by the quantile regression, which based on Cobb-Douglas production function. Finally, we estimated the potential of production increasing through the vertical and horizontal comparative analysis.The results show that maize production layout is more concentrated in China and follow the principle of comparative advantage. During the recent decades, maize variety have been updated more slowly, and the leading variety adoption rate is higher. For farmers, the saving type maize variety and the saving cultivation technology are more popular. They pay more attention to the stable yield of maize, rather than the high yield. Technology and production scale have important implications on cultivation and management of maize. And the main technology adoption has remarkable effects on maize yield, but leading variety with no significant effect on yield. From the perspective of the breadth of technological progress, technologies adoption can increase the maize yield nearly 100 kg/mu and total output potential of about 50 million tons. From the perspective of the depth of technological progress, Chinese maize yield will achieve the level of American and France by the middle of this century.Based on above, it suggests that fostering the saving technology and improved variety of high and stable yield, promoting improved varieties and technology adoption, and inducting planting behavior of farmers are the important ways to realizing the production potential of maize.