The Occurrence Of The Family Farm And Transformation Ofsmall-scale Farming System

Since Central Document No.1 proposed the development of family farms in 2013,under strong government support,the development of family farms began to accelerate.In order to more fully understand the underlying mechanisms behind the transformation of agriculture,the paper is going to study the agricultural transformation process of from peasants to family farms,which happened in a agriculture-based village located in northwest plains of ShanDong Province,through the case study approach.The study found,the family farm spontaneous occurrence based on the economic benefits is possible.Family farms benefit is achieved by high capital investment,while transfering large areas of land by high rents,family farms reduce labor inputs to make total revenue maximize.Enhance of the level of capitalization also makes the family farmcompletely market-oriented producers,further internal enterprise management,andpursue profit maximization,so that the business logic of family farm is different from peasants whose business logic is to meet household consumption.The transfer of laborcreates the conditions for the land transfer,while the high rent the family farm can withstand further promote the transfer of labor,so that centralized management of land resources to be possible.The study also found that the peasants would constitute a constraint to family farms.Family farm competes with peasant on land resources,is antagonistic relationship with peasants,and has a tendency to squeeze out peasants.Due to the livelihoods of peasants remain dependent on agricultural income as a whole,while they can achieve higher operating income than the transfer of the rent,in the case of family labor can not be transferred,even when faced with high rents incentives,most peasants do not willing to transfer the land or only willing to transfer part of the land,which constitutes a family farm expansion constraints.Finally,the occurrence of family farms showed that small-scale farming system began to move toward "depeasantization" in the direction transformation.Competitive advantage of high-rent to low-rent makes the establishment of larger peasants based on low-rent land transfer unsustainable,undermining the living basis of larger peasants,and then interrupted the process of spontaneous peasant economy to an internal scale transformation,at the same time,family farms further promote peasants withdraw from the land.Thus,it is a "depeasantization" processof the agricultural transformation.