Exploring the ecological protection impacts of cultivated land transfer: Explanation based on fertilizers and pesticides

The ecological protection of cultivated land (EPCL) is of great significance for enhancing its sustainable use and is also a practical material vehicle for maintaining national food security. Using data from a sample of 7,473 rural households from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey, this paper applies an endogenous switching regression model and Fields decomposition method to assess the impact of cultivated land transfer (CLT) on EPCL (i.e., fertilizer and pesticide input intensity, abbreviations is FPII). The empirical results show that farmers' participation in CLT can significantly reduce FPII. When it is assumed that households not participating in CLT participate in CLT, their FPII would be reduced by 52.39% and 17.56% respectively. The study further confirms that CLT has a positive effect on EPCL, contributing 5.74% and 7.47% to the reduction of FPII, respectively. In addition, agricultural subsidies, cultivated land titling, the size of cultivated land, the use of large-scale machinery, pollution of cultivated land, and farm income all positively affect farming households’ participation in CLT. Therefore, based on CLT, promoting large-scale and mechanized cultivated land management and deepening EPCL with the goal of reducing fertilizer and pesticide use are important approaches for enhancing the sustainable use of cultivated land.