Mechanization in land preparation and irrigation water productivity: insights from rice production

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how and to what extent mechanization in land preparation (MLP) can help improve irrigation water productivity (IWP) (measured as rice yield per unit volume of irrigation water). We employed an endogenous treatment regression model to estimate the 2021 China Land Economic Survey (CLES) data collected from Jiangsu province, China. The results reveal that MLP adoption increases IWP significantly; a higher IWP is determined by whether or not farmers adopt MLP rather than through which channel they access their farm machines; the effects of MLP adoption on IWP are monotonically increasing across the selected quantiles.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• food security
• irrigation water
• productivity
• mechanization

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) Virtual Conference on “Water Resource Management for Achieving Food Security in Asia Under Climate Change” held from October 26-27, 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2023.2197080

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Wanglin Ma upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [project number 72103075] and the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education [project number 2020SJA1763].