Study on Agricultural Low-Carbon Production Behavior and Its Influencing Factors: Evidence from Chinese Rice Farmers

It is an inevitable choice to carry out the low-carbon rice cultivation with increasing sink and reducing emission, low carbon and high yield to achieve the goal of "double carbon" and guarantee the "win-win" of national food security. This study employs a boosted regression trees to examine the driving factors on low-carbon production behaviors using the survey data of 2,173 rice farmers in Jiangxi Province, China. An empirical test was conducted on the influencing factors and mediating paths of farmers' adoption of low-carbon rice farming behavior. The results show that the degree of farmers' adoption of low-carbon rice farming practices is relatively low, and the largest proportion of farmers opt to use organic fertilizers. With the BRT model, the householder’s age (Age), the health conditions of family members (HFM), the proportion of year-round farmers to the total population (PYRFTP), the technical understanding level (TUL) and the importance motivation (MM) all played significant positive roles. The cultivated land fragmentation’s degree (CLF) and the difficulty level in obtaining information about low-carbon rice farming (DOILCRF) played significant negative roles. In view of this, in order to encourage farmers to adopt low-carbon rice cultivation practices, it is imperative to intensify the promotion of low-carbon rice cultivation technologies, utilize the demonstration effects of technology adoption, reinforce training programs for low-carbon rice farming techniques, establish incentive mechanisms for low-carbon rice cultivation, and carry out research and development on relevant low-carbon rice farming technologies.