Study on the Development Efficiency of Leisure Agriculture in Suburban Towns: An Empirical Analysis Based on the Case of Xinkou Town, Tianjin City

The leisure agriculture in suburban towns provides important space for citizens to carry out leisure activities. This paper takes Xinkou town in Tianjin city as an example to analyze the development efficiency of leisure agriculture in suburban towns. On the premise of establishing the indicators for evaluating the development efficiency of leisure agriculture in Xinkou town, this paper first uses the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the input and output indicators of leisure agriculture in 18 natural villages in Xinkou town, and calculates the comprehensive technical efficiency, target values, redundancy and returns to scale of leisure agriculture, and then evaluates the development efficiency of leisure agriculture in Xinkou town. Furthermore, by using the high/low clustering tool under the ArcGIS spatial statistics module, this paper conducts a high/low clustering analysis of the development efficiency of leisure agriculture in 18 natural villages of Xinkou town, and figures out the reasons for the high/low clustering of natural villages in Xinkou town spatially. After the research and analysis, the following conclusions are drawn: From the input–output perspective, except for Zhengzhuangzi village, Diliubu village, Yuejiakai village, and Dangcheng village, the development efficiency of leisure agriculture in other villages is relatively low due to their poor resource foundations, or deficiencies in management experience and transportation location. The development of leisure agriculture in Xinkou town is unbalanced, showing a pattern of polarized clusters: Diliubu village and Shuigaozhuang village form the most obvious high-value cluster, while Xiaoshawo village, Bijia village and Xuanjiayuan village form the most obvious low-value cluster, where the southeast corner of Xinkou town registers the lowest development efficiency value of leisure agriculture because it is far away from the town center and the main transportation arteries, and falls short of high-quality pastoral scenery. For the future development of leisure agriculture in Xinkou town, it is supposed to optimize the land use policy, provide active support to the competitive industrial and commercial capital, non-governmental capital, rural collective economic organizations, farmers’ cooperatives, and family farms, strengthen the in-depth integration of industries, improve the support system for new-type leisure agriculture, and build leisure agriculture brands with local features.