In order to alleviate the ecological and environmental problems caused by excessive application of chemical fertilizers, the Chinese government released the Zero Growth Action Plan for Chemical Fertilizer and Pesticides Use by 2020 in 2015 and the Action Plan for Organic-Substitute-Chemical-Fertilizer (OSCF) for Fruits, Vegetables and Tea in 2017. The second action plan was carried out in 100 pilot counties from 2017, with each pilot county receiving a subsidy of 1 million yuan to replace chemical fertilizers (CF) with organic fertilizers (OF).

What have been the effects of the OSCF policy since its implementation? Is the policy effective in promoting farmers' use of OF rather than CF? This study explores the impact of China's OSCF policy on fertilizer utilization by farmers and quantitatively evaluates the policy effects.

The Innovation Team of Resources Utilization and Regional Planning of Agriculture of CASS’s Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning examined the effects of the OSCF policy based on a survey of 281 greenhouse vegetable farmers in Shandong province of China.

Based on the expectancy theory proposed by Victor Vroom, the difference-in-difference (DID) method was employed to determine the net effects of the policy on the replacement of CF by OF.

The results show that the OSCF policy helps to significantly reduce the application of CF and increase OF's utilization for vegetable farmers; on average CF dropped 111.5 kg/ha while OF increased 346.36 kg/ha among the sampled farmers. Additional analysis reveals that the effects of the policy are consistent as regards the cost of CF and other operational characteristics. The results provide an argument for further enhancing the policy effects.

The research results were published in the Journal of Cleaner Production (IF 9.3) as The Effects of China's Organic-Substitute-Chemical-Fertilizer (OSCF) Policy on Greenhouse Vegetable Farmers. Yi Xiaoyan, associate research fellow of the Innovation Team of Resources Utilization and Regional Planning of Agriculture of CASS’s Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning is the first author. The research was funded by the Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund (No. 1610132018010) and as a major project of the National Social Science Fund (18ZDA048).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652621008970