Analysis Of Tea Grower’s Technology Choice And Technology Efficiency In Xinyang City

There is a rapid development of tea market in recent years. As one of the highvalue-added agricultural products, tea has been creating relatively high income. Nowadaysthere is controversy about the scale operation of agricultural products in academia. Althoughthe tea farmers consider local natural conditions and production conditions when operating,whether the technical efficiency can be achieved fully is still a problem in the case thatselecting a different scale of planting will bring different income. Thus, based on theperspective of scale difference, it is very important to research the reasonable scale that canmaximize the efficiency under different conditions of technical selection from two angles—tea farmers’ technology selection and efficiency.Based on the above background, this paper takes main production area of green tea—Xinyang city—for example. Normative analysis and empirical analysis are used at the sametime. The main parts of this paper are as follows. On one hand, it analyzes the influencemechanism, direction and degree of labor-saving and labor-intensive technology selections onthe production and income changes using farmers’ technology selection hypothesis andmultiple regression analysis method; On the other hand, it aims to get the technical efficiencydistribution under different selections by analyzing technical efficiency and scale efficiencytrends of different sizes with non-parametric of DEA method. Hope to get and provide atheoretical basis for the local tea farmers in the effective allocation of resources under theconditions of large-scale production.Combining theoretical analysis and empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1) under different sizes, technology choices havedifferent effects on the farmers’ income including both the direction and extent. Difference inthe rate of investment return of labor-saving technology, labor-intensive technology issignificant. Labor-saving technology has a greater rate of investment return for large-scalegrowers. Labor-intensive technology has a greater rate of return for small-scale growers.(2)The size of the tea production has a significant impact on farmers’ income and it is positive.The large scale is more conducive to the use of labor-saving technology and can enablefarmers to produce higher economic gain.(3) Under the labor-saving technology,comprehensive technical efficiency value of tea production is lower, and scale efficiency value is low; but under labor-intensive technology, comprehensive technical efficiency valueof tea production is higher, and scale efficiency value is very high. Therefore, underlabor-saving technology, there is possibility of improvement for comprehensive efficiency teaplantations; under the labor-intensive technology, various efficiency values have reached ahigh level.Based on the above analysis and on the view of improving production efficiency and teafarmers’ income, the following recommendations are proposed:(1) For tea farmers, on theone hand, it is necessary to strengthen the learning of tea-related technology, strengthen thetea garden management combined with increasing the amount of capital input; on the otherhand, they should engage actively in moderate scale production which is beneficial tointensive use of resource, and meanwhile increase the value of scale efficiency.(2) For thesociety and the government, they should strengthen guidance and support, improve naturaldisaster defense system actively and encourage tea farmers to participate in the cooperationorganization actively to improve economic benefits.