Impact of outsourcing agricultural production on the frequency and intensity of agrochemical inputs: evidence from a field survey of 1211 farmers in major food-producing areas in China

Addressing the excessive input and inefficient use of agrochemicals are crucial for global food security, environmental protection, and human health. This paper offers a new idea from the perspective of outsourcing agricultural production. The impact of outsourcing on the frequency and intensity of agrochemical inputs were theoretically analyzed and empirically tested using a field survey of 1211 farmers in Heilongjiang, Henan, and Hunan, the major food-producing areas in China. A Logit regression framework was used to analyze the effect, a conditional mixture process (CMP) method was used to address potential endogeneity concerns, and a mediation effect model was used to dissect the mechanism. The results show that the effect of outsourcing on both input frequency and input intensity of agrochemicals was positive at the 1% significance level. The positive effect conclusion still holds even after addressing the potential endogeneity concerns, and in the sub-sample estimates for maize, wheat, and rice. We conclude that outsourcing can improve the utilization efficiency of agrochemicals by increasing the frequency of agrochemical inputs, but fail to solve the excessive agrochemical inputs and even leads to a further increase in the intensity of agrochemical inputs. Moreover, the mechanism for an increase in agrochemical input intensity due to outsourcing was explored, and it is more likely to be caused by inhibiting farmers' investment in soil improvement measures.