Relationship of Arable Land Scale and High-Quality Development of Farmers’ Cooperatives: Evidence from Grain Production Cooperatives in China

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural development relies significantly on the high-quality progression of farmers’ cooperatives. While growing in number, farmers’ cooperatives are still facing the dilemma of improving the quality of their development. Land endowment is the foundation of agricultural production and the farmers’ cooperatives. Clarifying the correlation between arable land scale and the high-quality development of farmers’ cooperatives is conducive to the optimization of land use and the adoption of scientific land management measures to improve the quality of the development of farmers’ cooperatives. Based on the micro-survey data of 448 farmers’ cooperatives in three major grain-producing provinces, namely Heilongjiang, Henan, and Shandong in China, this paper constructs an evaluation index system for the high-quality development of farmers’ cooperatives and theoretically and empirically explores the impact mechanism of arable land scale on the high-quality development of farmers’ cooperatives. The results suggest the following: (1) there exists a significant “inverted U-shaped” association between the arable land scale and the development quality of cooperatives, and this result remains robust after testing through substitution variable and instrumental variable methods; (2) further research on the “inverted U-shaped” association reveals that the impact of arable land scale on the high-quality development of cooperatives undergoes four stages: “weak impact—rapid improvement—diminished growth effect—decline in development quality”; and (3) mechanism tests suggest that the “inverted U-shaped” association between the arable land scale and the development quality of cooperatives is mainly constrained by industrial development input, and arable land scale and industrial development show a strong complementary relationship. Therefore, in the course of enhancing the quality of farmers’ cooperatives, it is crucial to select appropriate land management strategies based on to their stage, paying special attention to the compatibility between arable land scale and industrial development.