Journal of Cleaner Production | 2021
The impact of farm scale and technology characteristics on the adoption of sustainable manure management technologies: Evidence from hog production in China
Abstract
Abstract A key strategy in reducing ecological damage from livestock manure is to improve farms’ adoption of sustainable manure management technologies (SMMTs). However, designing policies to promote SMMTs’ adoption is challenging due to the heterogeneity in farm scale and technology characteristics. Based on a questionnaire-based survey of 686 hog farms in the Poyang Lake Region—one of the biggest ecological wetlands in Asia and the largest freshwater lakes in China, this paper adopted a multivariate probit model to empirically investigate the impact of farm scale and technology characteristics on SMMTs’ adoption. The results show that there is significant heterogeneity in the SMMTs’ adoption across farm scales. Small-scale farms are more likely to adopt land-intensive and labor-intensive SMMTs, while medium-scale and large-scale farms are more likely to adopt capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive SMMTs. The main determinants of the adoption heterogeneity can be explained by the characteristics of farm and technology in labor, capital, land, and knowledge. Small-scale farms’ decision to adopt SMMTs is mostly associated with labor availability and land area; variables expressing capital constraints have the highest effect on medium-scale farms’ decision to adopt SMMTs, while land area is the key constraint for large-scale farms to choose SMMTs. We suggest that policies designed to promote SMMTs’ adoption need to be carefully planned and tailored to different scales of farms rather than being standardized.