Agricultural Socialized Services and Fertilizer Reduction: Evidence from Smallholder Vegetable Production in China

mallholder agriculture accounts for a substantial share of global fertilizer use, yet farm-level constraints in capital, labor, and technical capacity continue to impede greener production. Agricultural socialized services have been proposed as an institutional pathway for relaxing these constraints, but the channels through which they affect input use remain incompletely understood. We develop an analytical framework that links multi-stage agricultural socialized services to three channels of fertilizer reduction—input precision, factor substitution, and value realization—and use micro-level survey data on 970 vegetable producers in four facility-vegetable provincial-level jurisdictions in China (Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Shandong) to test the framework empirically. We find that the adoption of agricultural socialized services significantly reduces fertilizer application intensity, with the estimated effect robust to instrumenting for service adoption with village-level service development, median regression, sample restriction, and an alternative expenditure-based measure of adoption. Mechanism estimates indicate that mechanization services raise the adoption of soil testing and formula-based fertilization, field management services raise organic manure application, and marketing services raise farm-gate prices. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the fertilizer-reducing effect is concentrated among smallholders and older operators. These findings suggest that, in smallholder-dominated and aging agricultural systems, a service-based division of labor can advance green transformation without requiring large changes in land tenure.