ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Nutrition and Sustainable Diets
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1653777
This article is part of the Research TopicSustainable Food Consumption and Production in the 21st Century: Volume IIView all 11 articles
Impact of Farm Size on Pesticide Use: Evidence from Chinese Rice Production
Provisionally accepted
- 1College of Horticulture, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China
- 2Xinjiang Agricultural University, Urumqi, China
- 3Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China
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China's position as the world's largest consumer of chemical pesticides presents a critical challenge to the long-term sustainability of its food production systems. While vital for past food security achievements, the excessive application of these chemicals now degrades agro-ecological health and hinders sustainable agricultural development. Many studies have investigated technological fixes, yet a key structural question remains: how does farm size affect chemical dependency? Based on farm-level rice data from Jiangsu Province (2004-2017), this study addresses this gap by employing a 2SLS model to analyze the impact of farm size on pesticide costs. We find a U-shaped relationship between farm size and pesticide use. At the sample mean, a 1% increase in farm size is associated with a 0.089% decrease in pesticide cost per unit of land (mu) and a 0.104% decrease per kilogram of rice. This finding suggests that for the majority of farms, increasing scale is currently aligned with greater pesticide use efficiency. It challenges the notion that small-scale farming is inherently more sustainable, indicating that an optimal scale exists for minimizing chemical dependency. The paper concludes with policy implications for designing pathways toward a more sustainable, low-input food system in China.
Keywords: Farm size, Pesticide use, sustainable agriculture, U-shaped relationship, China
Received: 25 Jun 2025; Accepted: 20 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yuan, Zhu, Wang, Zai, Song and Amar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xueming Zai, College of Horticulture, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China
Yulan Song, Xinjiang Agricultural University, Urumqi, China
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