The Rapid Rise of Cross‐Regional Agricultural Mechanization Services in China

By Jin Yang, Zuhui Huang, Xiaobo Zhang, T. Reardon. 2013

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although Adam Smith (1776) and Alfred Marshall (1920) emphasized the gains from specialization that arise from the division of labor,their focus was on the manufacturing sector. Both saw farming as being on too small a scale and bereft of economies of scale, with a market that was too small and local, with too sharp a seasonality, and too quick a succession of tasks to support either the development of a division of labor over the tasks of a cropping season or of mechanization. Smith and Marshall’s vision of farming— and its implications for division of labor and mechanization—was manifest again in the 1950s to the present in Asia. Ruttan (2001) puts forward nearly the same ideas and terms as Smith and Marshall, but for contemporary small rice farms in Asia. He emphasizes that the use of machines for the series of short tasks performed on tiny farms would imply costly investment in specialized machines that small farmers would be loath to make. And even if these farmers mechanized, Ruttan posited that it would not induce a segmented and specialized farm labor market as,again,the critical mass of demand for each segment would not be present. Otsuka (2012) goes further along these lines to note that only on larger farms would the mechanization investment,

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a91708df5a7788cf841dc091246fe5058a99b126

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. C. Timmer
2. T. Reardon
3. Xiaobing Wang
4. Futoshi Yamauchi
5. Jiping Ding
6. Jikun Huang
7. X. Diao
8. Frances Cossar

In Political Science and International Relations

1. T. Reardon
2. Futoshi Yamauchi
3. Jikun Huang

Citations in the corpus

• Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from China (2015, unknown): “In a recent paper, Yang et al. (2013) showed that the rapid rise of agricultural mechanization services is among the main reasons agricultural production in China could continue to increase while more and more labor migrates and moves out of agriculture.”
• Mechanization in Ghana: Emerging demand, and the search for alternative supply models (2014, background): “Indeed, with China’s vast farmland across different agro-ecologies, the same crop can be harvested at different times which allows service providers to be able to operate up to eight months per year through migration (Yang et al., 2013).”
• The future of small farms in Asia (2016, unknown): “However, the results on machine investments are not clear possibly because of the development of active machine rental markets (Yang et al., 2013).”
• Rising wages, mechanization, and the substitution between capital and labor: evidence from small scale farm system in China (2016, background): “It has increased the speed of mechanization over the past two decades or so (Ji et al., 2012; Yang et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014).”
• Five inter-linked transformations in the Asian agrifood economy: Food security implications (2014, background): “Rental of farm machines has further developed recently with the spread of outsource- services of teams of labor with large harvesting machines in China that go from province to province harvesting rice (Yang et al., 2013).”
• Institutional Innovation and Policy Support to Facilitate Small-Scale Farming Transformation in China (2016, background): “The farmers’ machinery cooperatives and companies often sell their mechanization services across large areas, even across the provinces for several months (Yang et al., 2013).”