More Land, Less Pollution? How Land Transfer Affects Fertilizer Application

Reducing fertilizer use is key to curbing agricultural pollution and ensuring food safety. Land transfer enables farmers to obtain a more appropriate production scale, but its effect on the intensity of fertilizer application is not theoretically certain. On one hand, farmers with more land may adopt more scientific production methods, thus reducing the use of chemical fertilizers. On the other hand, the short-term behavior of land grantees on transferred land may increase fertilizer use intensity. This paper attempts to theoretically elucidate the specific mechanisms by which land transfer affects the intensity of fertilizer application and to verify the relationship between the two using data from fixed rural observation sites across China from 2011–2014 with the fixed-effects model and the mediating effect model. This paper concludes that (1) land transfer significantly reduces the intensity of fertilizer use; (2) land transfer increases the land size and promotes the use of machinery by farmers, but only the increase in land size further reduces the intensity of fertilizer application; (3) the effect of land transfer on fertilizer application intensity is significant only for food crops and not for cash crops, and (4) the effect of land transfer on fertilizer application intensity is most pronounced in western China, where land fragmentation is the severest and insignificant in eastern China, where agricultural modernization is more advanced.