Experimental Design Details
Agricultural service system plays a crucial role in agricultural reform, especially in promoting the process of land aggregation. The majority of agricultural production processes can rely on mechanization services to be completed, thus saving agricultural labor. These processes include plowing, sowing, fertilizing (using drones), harvesting, and more. However, irrigation has consistently been the slowest aspect in the socialization service process among various agricultural production stages. This limitation hinders the progress of agricultural land aggregation.
The question here is that whether the low level of irrigation service is due to lack of proper technology, or due to lack of market suppl? Maybe both of them are reasons?
This study aims to use technology information provision and market information provision as two orthogonal interventions in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Hebei Province of China, covering approximately 1500 farmers, to investigate whether the technology information or market information are barriers of the development of irrigation service market.
The following hypotheses will be tested:
Hypothesis 1: Availability of advanced irrigation technology will increase farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for adopting irrigation service.
Hypothesis 2: Availability of market information will increase farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for adopting irrigation service.
The RCT will be nested in a large-scale field household survey conducted in Hebei Province in China, designed to evaluate the policy impact of Chinese government’s police intervention for groundwater overexploitation control.
Two types of surveys will be conducted. The first type is “regular farm household survey”, which will be done at villages. 944 households in 148 villages will be surveyed. The second type is “professional farm survey”, which aims to interview the farmer with farm size larger than 50 mu. Around 500 professional large farmers will be surveyed. Randomization will be done in both of the surveys.
During the survey, all farmers will be asked to reveal their initial WTP for the irrigation service at the baseline survey status. Then, farmers in the treatment groups will receive the corresponding treatments. On the second day of the survey, all farmers, including those in the treatment and control groups, will be phone called to collect updated WTP.
After at least one growing season, a follow-up survey will be conducted as the endline survey for the RCT. During the baseline and endline surveys, farmers' agricultural production, non-farm work, living conditions, demographic information, etc., will be collected. Local socioeconomic and natural information will be collected through a village-level questionnaire face-to-face interview, answered by a village leader.
The field operation will be supported by governments at different administrative levels to guarantee the randomization of the sample selection and treatment assignment. At the grassroots level, village leaders will be informed by their corresponding township leaders about the general plan of the survey. Farmers will be randomly selected from the name list at the village leader's office 2 or 3 days prior to the survey event. Village leaders will cooperate with the research team to contact each of the sampled farmers and make an appointment with them to participate in our survey and RCT experiment at the village leader's office building.
All surveyed farmers will be informed by the survey investigators before the survey starts about the purpose of the survey (i.e., for purely scientific research purposes), the general survey structure (including an RCT experiment), the anticipated length of the survey, and other necessary information (such as self-introduction and payment information for participating in the survey) to obtain their agreement to participate in the survey.
The research subjects of this experiment are real farmers in Hebei Province of China. We will collect the contact information of all the surveyed individuals. Only adult farmers will be invited to participate in our field survey and experiment. The anticipated number of subjects is approximately 1500.