Ruixin Zhang

Amidst the rapid expansion of farmer cooperatives in China, effectively leveraging these organisations to encourage members to reduce chemical pesticide use holds significant implications for ensuring food safety and advancing high-quality agricultural development. Existing research has predominantly focused on whether farmers joining farmer cooperatives influence their green production behaviour, while generally overlooking the pronounced heterogeneity among farmer cooperative members in China. Ordinary members’ choice of the farmer cooperatives’ transaction model essentially constitutes a proactive embedding within different institutional arrangements. The series of contractual designs, oversight mechanisms, and incentive structures underpinning the farmer cooperatives’ transaction model influences members’ green production practices. Therefore, based on survey data from 608 farmer cooperative members in Sichuan Province, this paper employs an endogenous switching regression model to construct a counterfactual framework. Addressing endogeneity issues reveals that members’ selection of the farmer cooperatives’ transaction model favours improved chemical pesticide reduction behaviour. The transmission mechanism shows that the improvement in members’ chemical pesticide reduction behaviour, driven by the farmer cooperatives’ transaction model, stems from, in order of contribution, surplus distribution incentives, product delivery standards, production factor input constraints, and production service incentives. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the transaction model of farmer cooperatives with companies, fruit merchants, and e-commerce platforms enhances members’ chemical pesticide reduction behaviour by 57.6%, 43.4%, and 44.3%, respectively. To strengthen the role of farmer cooperatives in promoting agricultural green transformation and chemical pesticide reduction, this paper proposes four policy recommendations. First, refine internal governance within farmer cooperatives to strengthen institutional designs that balance incentives and constraints. Second, expand stable partnerships between farmer cooperatives and companies to establish robust order systems and deep cooperation models centred on ‘premium prices for premium quality. Third, enhance technical training and unified agricultural input services to reduce transition costs for members. Fourth, leverage demonstration effects within villages to create a collective atmosphere for green production, using ‘group effects’ to drive a holistic transformation among members.

In the rapid development of rural tourism, multiple disturbances, such as capital reorganization, uneven resource distribution, and the marginalization of farmers as the main body, have emerged. This has led to the dual challenges of increased vulnerability and insufficient resilience of farmers’ livelihood systems in the face of risk shocks. Based on survey data of the “Agri-Tourism–Commerce–Culture Integration” demonstration zone in China, this study integrates the Pressure–State–Response model into the analysis of livelihood resilience and constructs a “vulnerability–adaptability–recuperability” tri-dimensional framework. Through methods such as the entropy weight method, the synthetical index method, grey relational degree analysis, and the obstacle degree model, this study measures the levels of different livelihood types of farmers in each dimension of livelihood resilience and their influencing factors. The research findings indicate that the overall livelihood resilience of farmers in the study area was at a medium level, with vulnerability making the most significant contribution, reflecting that the current livelihood system is dominated by risk resistance. Different types of farmers exhibit heterogeneity in resilience, with tourism-oriented farmers showing the highest resilience and agriculture-oriented farmers the lowest. However, tourism-oriented farmers also display the most prominent vulnerability, revealing the tension between short-term efficiency enhancement and long-term risk diversification in single livelihood strategies. Key factor analysis reveals that vulnerability correlates most strongly with livelihood resilience. The most correlated indicators are the price increase rate, proportion of migrant workers, and neighborhood trust in the vulnerability, adaptability, and recuperability dimensions. Diagnosis of obstacle factors reveal that loan accessibility, land resource dependency, and agricultural risk perception rank as the top three common obstacles, with tourism-driven farmers exhibiting higher obstacle degrees than other farmer categories. These findings not only validate the empowering effect of rural tourism on farmers’ livelihoods but also reveal the different livelihood strategies chosen by various farmers. Based on the results, this study proposes policy recommendations of “common optimization + individual adaptation” to enhance farmers’ livelihood resilience. This is conducive to transforming external support into farmers’ endogenous resilience capabilities and provides a useful reference for achieving the deep integration of rural tourism and farmers’ livelihood systems.

Due to the growing trend of rural labor migration, farmers’ labor allocation under the condition of constant time endowment has gradually become a key factor in the transformation of green agricultural production methods. Using the propensity score matching method, this paper verified the influence of labor migration on citrus growers’ fertilizer application using 814 survey data from Sichuan Province, China. The study found that the boosting effect of capacity accumulation brought on by farmers’ labor migration was greater than the weakening effect of labor constraints and that the average chemical fertilizer application per acre decreased from 6.95 to 6.74 after farmers’ labor migration, a 3.06 percent decrease. Second, labor migration reduces chemical fertilizer application by allowing farmers to acquire knowledge and technology for green agricultural production and to increase off-farm income. Third, the choice of labor migration by farmers with higher agricultural incomes and younger ages promotes a reduction in their chemical fertilizer application. Therefore, this paper makes the following suggestions: the government should appropriately guide farmers in their labor migration decisions, increase public awareness of green agricultural knowledge and technology, and encourage farmers to to invest their off-farm income in green production. Farmers with higher agricultural income and younger ages, in particular, should be encouraged to choose labor migration and train to become new agricultural business entities.

The study explores the impact of education of farmers’ cooperatives on members’ green production behavior. The Probit, Oprobit model and the mediation effect model are used to analyze the influence mechanism of the cooperative’s education on the members’ adoption of four types of green prevention and control technologies and the overall adoption rate, and the instrumental variable method is used for endogeneity treatment and robustness test. The results show that: (1) The education of cooperatives have a significant positive impact on the members’ physical pest control technology, biological pesticide application technology, water and fertilizer integration technology, scientific pesticides reduction technology, and the overall adoption rate plays a critical role. As a result, there is a certain degree of heterogeneity in different intergenerational member groups. (2) The education of cooperatives can significantly enhance members’ cognition of green prevention and control. (3) Through on-the-spot demonstration and general meetings of the members to carry out education, members are more likely to adopt green prevention and control technologies. These findings shed light on the mechanisms by which cooperative’s education affect the green production behavior of cooperative members and provide important policy implications for green agricultural development.