How channels of knowledge acquisition affect farmers’ adoption of green agricultural technologies: evidence from Hubei province, China

ABSTRACT

Farmers’ adoption of green agricultural technologies (GATs) could reduce the negative environmental impacts of traditional agriculture in China. Despite the benefits of GATs, their adoption rate has not been high. While previous studies have examined the information and communication technologies that influence the adoption of GATs, most have selected only one of the GATs and have not distinguished between public and private channels of knowledge acquisition. In this paper, based on a sample of 732 rural households from Hubei Province, we used a negative binomial model to examine the role of knowledge acquisition channels on GATs adoption. Overall, we found that radio and the government (through its face-to-face channels) are positively associated with farmers’ adoption of GATs; however, farmers adopted more GATs when they had acquired knowledge from the government than from radio. A possible explanation and a policy implication is that direct communication with farmers and practical demonstration of the benefits of GATs are preferred to passive reception of information.

KEYWORDS:

• Channels of knowledge acquisition
• green agricultural technologies
• negative binomial model
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The underlying data for this analysis are available from the authors upon request.

Notes

1 Conventional farming in developing countries exhibits largescale intensified agriculture, which causes serious local, regional, and global environmental consequences (Matson, Parton, Power, & Swift, 1997).

2 The Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa RISING) program, which is supported by the United States Agency.

3 Parastatals are public organizations that are separate from the government, but whose activities serve the state.

4 The magnitude of the effect of different mass media (e.g., TV and radio) on the adoption of agricultural technology differs (e.g., Awuni, Azumah, & Donkoh, 2018).

5 According to China Statistical Yearbook (2021), which is a collection of some of China's statistical indicators in 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Key Project of National Social Science Fund (No. 20AZD091) and the scholarship granted by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). Dušan Drabik acknowledges financial support from the Slovak Research and Development Agency (Contract No. APVV-21-0174) and from Operational Programme – Integrated Infrastructure (Project No. Drive4SIFood 313011V336.