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Against the backdrop of pervasive land fragmentation and high transaction costs, organized land transfer has emerged as a growing trend in China’s agricultural land market, facilitating the transition toward moderate-scale farming. Based on survey data from 1472 households across 72 villages in Jiangsu Province, this study investigates the impact of organized land transfer on agricultural land allocation efficiency and explores the underlying mechanisms. The results show that organized land transfer significantly enhances agricultural land allocation efficiency. This finding proves to be robust across a series of robustness analyses. Specifically, organized land transfer enhances land allocation efficiency, primarily by enhancing transfer stability, expanding the transfer scale, and broadening the transfer scope. Moreover, our analysis of moderating factors reveals that the strength of the village collective economy positively moderates the relationship between organized land transfer and efficiency, whereas lineage networks exert a negative moderating influence. Addressing equity implications, this study also examines the model’s impact on farmers’ autonomy. The findings indicate that organized land transfer significantly suppresses transfer willingness, particularly in those with low incomes and the elderly. These results carry significant policy implications: when promoting organized land transfer, it is crucial to balance the strengthening of village collectives’ intermediary role with robust regulatory frameworks designed to safeguard farmers’ land rights and autonomy.

Land use transitions increasingly hinge on how governance arrangements shape resource use efficiency and knowledge diffusion in agricultural systems. Collective irrigation, as a key institutional form of water governance, has been widely promoted to improve irrigation performance, yet its potential linkages with peer effects in agricultural production remain insufficiently understood. Using plot-level panel data from Jiangsu Province, China, for 2015 and 2019, this study examines how peer effects and collective irrigation affect the technical efficiency of rice production. A time-varying stochastic frontier production function is employed to estimate technical efficiency, while a linear-in-means model is used to capture peer effects and compare their effects across different irrigation types. The results indicate that peer effects play a significant role in improving technical efficiency in rice-growing areas. These effects are more pronounced under collective irrigation arrangements. Moreover, peer effects under collective irrigation are stronger in villages without public technology extension services, among farmers with lower grain production capacity or without off-farm employment, and on smaller plots. Mechanism analysis indicates that peer effects under collective irrigation operate partly through input decisions, especially pesticide use. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of considering both peer interactions and irrigation institutions when improving agricultural production efficiency.

Given the significant shifts in rural labor mobility patterns and their continuous influence on the transformation of the land factor market, it is crucial to understand the relationship between labor factor prices and land factor prices. This understanding is essential to keep land factor prices within a reasonable range. This study establishes a theoretical framework to investigate how migrant workers’ return shapes land price formation mechanisms. Using 2023 micro-level survey data from eight counties in Jiangsu Province, China, this study empirically examines how migrant workers’ return affects land transfer prices and its underlying mechanisms through OLS regression and instrumental variable approaches. The findings show that under the current pattern of labor mobility, the outflow factor alone is no longer sufficient to exert substantial downward pressure on land transfer prices. Instead, the localized return of labor has emerged as a key driver behind the rise in land transfer prices. This upward mechanism is primarily realized through the following pathways. First, factor substitution effect: this effect lowers labor prices and increases the relative marginal output value of land factors. Second, supply–demand effect: migrant workers’ return simultaneously increases land demand and reduces supply, intensifying market shortages and driving up transfer prices. Lastly, the results demonstrate that enhancing the stability of land tenure security or increasing local non-agricultural employment opportunities can mitigate the effect of rising land transfer prices caused by the migrant workers’ return. According to the study’s findings, stabilizing land factor prices depends on full non-agricultural employment for migrant workers. This underscores the significance of policies that encourage employment for returning rural labor.

Climate variability intensifies weather risks across smallholder rainfed farming systems in Africa. Farmers often respond by minimizing the use of modern inputs and opting for low-cost traditional practices, a strategy that decreases average yields and perpetuates poverty. While crop insurance could incentivize greater adoption of inputs, indemnity-based programs face market failures. Weather index insurance (WII), which utilizes objective weather data to trigger payouts while addressing traditional crop insurance market failures, is a viable solution. However, empirical evidence on the impact of WII remains limited, with most studies relying on controlled experiments or hypothetical scenarios that overlook real-world adoption dynamics. This study analyzed observational data from 400 smallholder farmers across diverse agroecological zones in Njoro Sub-County, Kenya, using instrumental variable regression to evaluate the impact of weather index insurance (WII) on input adoption and intensity of use. Findings indicated that WII significantly increased the adoption and intensification of improved inputs while displacing traditional practices, with effects moderated by gender, financial access, and infrastructure. Specifically, active WII users applied 28.7 kg/acre more chemical fertilizer and used 2.6 kg/acre more hybrid maize seeds while reducing manure and traditional seed usage by 27 kg/acre and 2.9 kg/acre, respectively. However, the effectiveness of WII was context-dependent, varying under extreme drought conditions and in high-fertility soils, which directly affected resilience outcomes. These findings suggest that policies should combine insurance with targeted agroecological practices and complementary measures, such as improved access to credit and gender-sensitive extension programs tailored to the specific needs of women farmers, to support sustainable agricultural transformation.

Large-scale farming is crucial to improving agricultural competitiveness and increasing farmers’ income. With the rapid development of the digital economy, applying digital technology in agricultural production is regarded as a new source of enhancing agricultural competitiveness. However, few studies have discussed the potential link between the application of digital production technology and large-scale farming from a micro-perspective. Based on survey data from rice farmers in Jiangsu Province, China, in 2023, this study uses an endogenous switching model to analyze the impact of digital production technology on large-scale farming and its potential mechanisms. The results show that applying digital production technology significantly promotes large-scale farming at both the farm and plot levels. These findings remain robust after a series of robustness tests, including changing estimation methods and redefining dependent variables. Mechanism analysis reveals that digital production technology promotes large-scale farming through three pathways: reducing labor costs, mitigating disaster risks, and enhancing managerial capabilities. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the impact of digital production technology on large-scale farming is more pronounced among farmers with high digital literacy or those in regions with advanced digital finance. This study emphasizes that promoting digital production technology is feasible for achieving large-scale farming.

The highly intensive use of pesticide is a big threat to environmental sustainability in China. This study explains the increase of rice pesticide use in China’s rapid urbanization process from the perspective of changes in the delay of pest control. Based on multi-stage random sampling, 20 villages of five counties in central Jiangsu were selected, and the production data of 430 paddy fields were surveyed. Logit model results show that living outside village of agricultural labors will increase the probability of delay in control of diseases and pest, while the increase of farm size and the development of outsourcing services and public monitoring and forecasting services will help reduce the probability of delay. The OLS model results show that the delay in rice diseases and pest control has negative externalities. The delays of other farmers in the village will significantly increase the frequency of pesticide use. These results highlight important policy implications for the development of large-scale farming to substitute part-time farming and the development of diseases and pest control services.

The agricultural land management under the household responsibility system (HRS) in rural China empowers farmers with land tenure rights, meeting the basic needs for their livelihoods and employment by cultivating the land. This paper investigates the pivotal role of agricultural cultivated land as a social safety net, ensuring livelihood security for farmers confronting a recession in off-farm employment. Our analysis is based on data collected from six provinces (Heilongjiang, Henan, Zhejiang, Yunnan, Shandong, and Anhui) in the rural areas of China from 2019 to 2020. We investigated the impact of the off-farm employment recession on the mental health of farmers and the moderating effect of land as a social safety net on the relationship between the off-farm employment recession and mental health. The analysis points to the following results: (1) The majority of farmers have significantly reduced off-farm working time during employment recession. (2) The off-farm employment recession has worsened farmers’ mental health. (3) Farmers’ land assets through tenure rights provide both income and employment security functions, which can mitigate the adverse effects of the off-farm employment recession on their mental health. The findings of this study highlight the crucial role of land assets to reduce the negative impact of unemployment in the context of economic recession, emphasizing the significance of the policies supporting the land rights among vulnerable rural groups.

Agricultural infrastructure is a typical public good, and it plays an important role in rural development. The “participation of beneficiary groups (PBG)” system is encouraged by government to supply village level public goods in China. Based on micro survey data from the village level in Jiangsu Province, this study analyzes the status of agricultural infrastructure construction and the promotion of PBG model and quantitatively analyzes the impact of different factors using an econometric model. The results found that the PBG model of agricultural infrastructure construction only accounted for 22.8% of projects, and the bottleneck was the challenge in raising funds at the village level; the total number of projects and the number of projects in the PBG model significantly increased with collective irrigation, and the farmland lease was found to hinder the promotion of the PBG model. The government should take measures to enhance farmers’ awareness of social trust, continuously improve the governance capacity of the village collectives, improve the role of village self-governance and social forces in agricultural infrastructure construction, and actively guide farmers and private enterprises to participate in agricultural infrastructure construction so that farmers can obtain more practical benefits.

The popularization and use of green production technology is the key to promoting the sustainable development of agriculture. Exploring the path of promoting farmers’ adoption of green production technology has important theoretical and practical significance for promoting the green transformation of agriculture and realizing the high-quality development of agriculture. This study examined the impact of contract performance on the adoption of green production technology in the farmland transfer market based on the characteristics of green production technology. An empirical test was conducted using survey data from Heilongjiang, Henan, Zhejiang, and Sichuan Provinces, which differ in agricultural resource endowment and economic development. The results demonstrated that farmland area was positively associated with the number of green production technologies adopted by farmers and use of straw returning, subsoiling, and soil testing for formula fertilization technology. Moreover, improving the performance rates of farmland transfer contracts strengthened the promotional effect of operation scale on green production technology adoption. Using either contract execution or dispute resolution rates to measure contract performance promoted the adoption of green production technology, particularly for large-scale farmers. Therefore, in the publicity and promotion of agricultural green production technology, the government should not only formulate differentiated promotion strategies and support policies based on resource endowment, but also focus on the construction of rural legal systems, which are helpful for building and maintaining a good farmland market order and performance environment, and create conditions for the durability and stability of technology adoption.

Many studies have shown that credit is crucial for the adoption of new agricultural inputs and technologies in developing countries. Hence, the issue about how financial institutions select farmer applicants to give loans to is very important. We used primary data from 401 rural households to show what kinds of farmers can get credit from banks in Sudan. The probit model is used to examine the factors that determine both farmers’ access to credit and the adoption of new inputs, and to show the nexus of credit accessibility and the adoption of new input through other factors. The main findings show that farming experience, the number of close friends, hire labor, cultivated land, irrigation, and extension services, are the factors that significantly determine farmers’ credit accessibility from banks. Some of these determinants, such as cultivated land and irrigation, also influence the adoption of new inputs. There exists a strong correlation between credit accessibility from banks and the possibility of using new input. In addition, an IV probit model shows that farmers’ use of chemical fertilizers and improved varieties directly influences the loan decision from banks. This means farmers’ credit demand induced by the chance of using new input actually has been satisfied by the banks in Sudan. The comparison results show that, for the subsample, for the Farmer’s Commercial Bank (FCB) the nexus between credit accessibility and the adoption of new inputs is stronger than that of the Agricultural Bank of Sudan (ABS). Therefore, this study recommended that the Sudan government should choose FCB as the lender of subsidized credit to increase the banks’ contribution to the development of plant production.