氮肥在中国的过度使用及其对农业生产的不利影响已在国内和国际引起关注。除公共机构推动的多种促进农业可持续发展的实践外，借助信息通讯技术或数字服务手段推动可持续农业实践的私人部门创新和创业正在崭露头角。本研究探讨了一个创业企业依托信息技术提供农业技术推广服务对农户采用可持续农业实践的影响。结果表明，依托信息技术的农业社会化服务并没有显著减少小麦种植中的氮肥使用量。然而，信息技术在农业社会化服务的使用却促使农民的氮肥施用趋向于可持续和精准施肥。创业企业的此种创业模式在农户参与性和财务可持续性方面面临巨大挑战。

With the rapid growth of China’s economy, rising demand for safety food has been accompanied by frequent food safety scandals. Given that China’s farming is dominated by millions of small-scale farms, ensuring food safety is a major challenge facing the public and private sectors. The direct farm (DF) program, initiated in 2008, represents one of the government’s major initiatives to modernize the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables (FFV) and improve food safety. Under the DF program, participating national and international retailers are expected to establish more direct procurement relationships with farm communities. While it is often claimed that greater participation by retailers in the production and post-harvest processing implied the DF program will lead to improved quality, safety and traceability, systematic evidence remains elusive as existing studies are largely narrative, based on case studies, or theoretical inference. Little empirical evidence is available for a broader evaluation of the DF program. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing the overall performance of a single retailer’s DF experience with respect to the procurement and food safety of FFV. We use data from a survey of production managers of 35 DF production bases (PBs) spread across 11 provinces, 3 cities and 1 autonomous region in China. The results show a mixture of opportunities and challenges. On one hand, the DF program improves production practices and distribution channels of FFV produced on its PBs, thus facilitating the move of China’s food system towards improved food safety compliance. On the other hand, significant heterogeneity in the traceability of food and the ability of DF to meet higher safety standards is evident both across major product categories and across household-operated vs. firm-operated PBs. The paper concludes with policy implications.

Chemical fertilizer plays an important role in increasing food production in China. Nevertheless, excessive nitrogen fertilizer use in China has resulted in severe environmental problems. The goal of this paper is to examine the impacts of an improved nitrogen management (INM) training experiment on farmers’ chemical nitrogen (N) use behaviors in maize production in China. Based on household data collected from 813 maize farmers in Shandong, China, this study finds that while INM training can significantly reduce farmers’ N fertilizer use, an INM training is not sufficient to change farmer’s practices significantly, and farmers only partially adopted the recommended INM. This study reveals that China faces challenges to transform its agriculture to a low-carbon one. The research also sheds light on China’s extension system and future technologies in meeting the objectives of reducing the excessive nitrogen fertilizer use in agricultural production.