Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 41, November 2016, Pages 26-32
Global Environmental Change

Reducing China’s fertilizer use by increasing farm size

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016.08.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Increase in farm size should be integrated into the actions to reduce fertilizer use.

  • Large-scale farms are more sensitive to fertilizer use if fertilizer subsidies are withdrawn.

  • Increasing farm size can also increase food production on a per-area basis.

  • Achieving a zero increase of fertilizer use should consider the socioeconomic aspects.

Abstract

The excessive use of fertilizer has resulted in serious environmental degradation and a high health cost in China. Much research has focused on the technological innovation to improve fertilizer use efficiency in crop production, but the socioeconomic constraints are at present poorly understood. Here, we find that fertilizer use on a per-area basis sharply decreased with the increase of farm size; surprisingly, the crop yield is higher in large-scale farms compared to that in smallholder farms in China. High labor cost suggests a low machinery level in smallholder farms, which inhibit the application of precise fertilization technologies and management based on scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the dependence of income from cropland is lower for smallholder farmers who have part-time jobs in urban areas compared to the professional farmers in large-scale farms. Therefore, compared to smallholder farms, large-scale farms are generally more sensitive to the increase of fertilizer price and would reduce their fertilizer use if withdrawing fertilizer subsidies that used to be considered as the key driver of fertilizer overuse. Considering the dominance of smallholder farms in China, increasing farm size should be integrated into the actions such as improving technological innovation and providing better information transfer to achieve the goal of no increase in Chinese fertilizer use.

Introduction

To meet the food, fiber and feed demands of an increasing and gradually wealthier population, a series of policies were implemented to encourage synthetic fertilizer (SF, fertilizer produced in factories) production and use in China during the last three decades (Li et al., 2013). However, synthetic fertilizers are substantially overused and misused in Chinese cropland (Ju et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2014). In 2010, over 55 million tonnes of SF, accounting for over 30% of global fertilizer use, was applied to Chinese cropland, which only accounts for 7% of the global cropland area (FAO, 2016). Nevertheless, this overuse of SF still cannot meet the grain demand in China, leaving a gap that is filled by importing corn and soybeans, mainly for animal feed (Gu et al., 2015). More seriously, overusing SF in China has heavily polluted the environment including not only water bodies (Chen et al., 2014), but also the atmosphere (Gu et al., 2014). Unfortunately, SF use is still increasing with an average annual increase rate of 3% over the last decade (2003–2013) (NBSC, 2015). Given that SF overuse is already causing many negative impacts (Gu et al., 2012, Gu et al., 2014), the production of sufficient food with less fertilizer and less pollution in the near future is imperative and urgent for China. The challenge is also quite relevant to countries around the world far beyond China that struggle to address agricultural productivity while also mitigating environmental impacts related to fertilizer use.

Therefore, to address this issue, the central government of China officially launched the ‘Action Plan for the Zero Increase of Fertilizer Use’ (APZIFU) in 2015 (See Supporting information (SI) text for details of this plan). The goal of this plan is to stop the increase of SF use by 2020 without reducing food production. However, it focuses largely on fertilization technologies but only minimally on the social and economic aspects, and how to realize the goals in the face of social-economic barriers remains unclear. In this paper, we explore how proper fertilization technologies can be utilized by farmers, via policy improvements, to overcome social and economic barriers and realize the goal of zero percent increase in SF use, with a focus on N fertilizer.

Section snippets

Scenario analysis

We used the Urban Rural Complex N Cycling (URCNC) model to predict N fertilizer use in China (Gu et al., 2015). Human population and the per capita gross domestic product (PGDP) are two important parameters that affect future N fertilizer use (Table S1). Human population and per capita consumption level determine the total demands for food in the future, and PGDP is generally related to the per capita consumption level and N fertilizer management ability (Tilman et al., 2011).

We adopted a

Biophysical potentials to reduce fertilizer use

The N fertilizer use is projected to increase from 29 Tg N yr−1 in 2010 to 42 Tg N yr−1 by 2020 with imported grain remaining at the 2010 level, and to 53 Tg N yr−1 in 2020 with no grains imported in 2020 under the BAU (Fig. 1). The diet change scenario (S1) reduces N fertilizer use from 42 Tg yr−1 (BAU) to 34 Tg yr−1 in 2020 with grain imports at the 2010 level. If no grains were imported in 2020, N fertilizer use would be 46 Tg yr−1 in 2020. The NUE scenario (S2) reduces N fertilizer use to 18 Tg yr−1 in 2020

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the “973”Program (2014CB953803) of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, National Key Research and Development Project of China (2016YFC0207906), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41201502, 41471190, 71503232) and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LR15G030001, LQ14G030011). The work contributes to the UK-China Virtual Joint Centre on Nitrogen “N-Circle” funded by the Newton Fund via UK BBSRC/NERC (BB/N013484/1

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