The Factors Affecting Farmers’ Decision-Making Behavior On Planting Scale

In recent years, with the development of economy, changes in the labor structure and land resources, smallholder production model under the household-contract responsibility system has been unable to achieve the goals of increasing farmers’ income and food production. Modern agriculture with large scale, professional technique and intensive production inputs, will definitely become the trend of agricultural development. Meanwhile, the government has repeatedly stressed that peasant household is the main part in land transfer and scale operation. Under such a policy background, the study of farmers’ decision-making behavior on planting scale is particularly necessary.In this study, we choose rice farmers as the main object. From the perspective of utility maximization, we take Jiangsu Province as example and make use of literature review to research the development status of rice production in Jiangsu. Using questionnaires and interviews to analyze farmers’ differences and similarities in family characteristics, production features and external environment characteristics. And then, we carried on the empirical analysis of factors affecting farmers’decision-making behavior on planting scale. The innovation lying in this article may be setting up a theoretical framework to analyze farmers’ decision-making behavior on planting area, the study on this area is rare at present.The study found that rice yield in Jiangsu Province ranked first in China for many years, acreage and production accounted for 7% and 9% of the country respectively. However, rice production in Jiangsu Province is still facing a lot of problems. The rice yield is stagnating over the years and under the pressure of increasing demand. Farmers have little initiative to plant rice because of poor benefit. Manufacturing and other aspects of operating conditions still need to improve. Compared to farmers without increasing their planting scale, we find that farmers who increase planting scale have differences in many aspects with the former, such as machinery condition, non-farm employment training, rice production time, rice yield per mu, non-farm employment income.Through empirical regression analysis, we find that the influencing factors of farmers’ decision-making behavior on planting area include:non-farm employment training, net non-farm income, the local non-farm employment opportunities, the kinds of crop have a negative impact on farmers’ decision-making behavior. Machinery condition, the amount of family agricultural labor, family’s primary industry, agriculture subsidy income, rice yield per mu, rice planting time have a positive impact on farmers’ decision-making behavior. The non-farm training, rice planting time, rice yield per mu, net non-farm income are the most significant factors. Education years have no significant influence on farmers’ decision-making behavior.Based on the research results, this article gives some policy recommendations:speed up the development of agricultural mechanization, improve agricultural subsidy policy, promote agricultural labor transfer.