Does choice of plant variety affect farmers’ technical efficiency? Evidence from wheat farming across China
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Over the last five decades, high yield wheat varieties substantially contributed to increasing China’s wheat production. Thousands of improved wheat varieties have been developed in the last decades and only the minority of them are adopted by farmers. Improving the efficiency of agricultural inputs is an important consideration for variety breeding, as it allows improvements in yields at the farm level. The study is to investigate whether farmers’ practices differ between wheat varieties and to what extent the choice of wheat variety affects farmers’ technical efficiency. The stochastic frontier analysis was applied based on a household survey of 1,681 wheat farmers across four provinces in China. The results showed that the technical efficiency of wheat production is easily overestimated if varietal heterogeneity is excluded. We also found that Chinese wheat farmers reached average levels of technical efficiency of over 0.85, suggesting that little room for increase of wheat yields can be achieved. Thus, the introduction of new and improved wheat varieties needs to be better facilitated, especially given that the current levels of fertilizer and pesticides need to be reduced. These results suggest that variety selection influence farmers’ wheat production substantially and the effect differs between regions, which call for the agricultural extension program for varieties replacement with priority setting.
Authors: Wenbin Zhou, Huaiyu Wang, Xi Hu, Fengying Duan
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,530
Awards: G3497384845, G8424596028
OpenAlex ID: W4414476012