Will neighbor’s livestock breeding promote farmer using manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer?

The combination of planting and breeding is the most basic form of realizing recycling agriculture. It is of vital significance to promote manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer to improve agricultural ecological environment as well as agricultural sustainable development. From the perspective of manure accessibility, theoretical framework was established to analyze the effects of neighbor’s average breeding scale on farmers’ manure and chemical fertilizer usage behaviors and high dimension fixed effect model was applied to identify those effects based on National Fixed Point survey data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs during 2011 to 2018. Results are as follows. (1) Neighbor’s breeding can effectively promote farmers to use manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer, which remains robust using first-order lag term of core variable considering endogeneity, performing sub-sample test and winsorizing test and replacing explained variable. (2) Heterogeneity analysis shows that the livestock and poultry prohibition zone policy implemented in 2014 undermined the effect of neighbor’s breeding on the substitution of manure for chemical fertilizer. Compared with farmers who both engage in planting and breeding, the improvement of neighbor’s average breeding scale in the village can effectively promote farmers using manure as a substitute for fertilizer for farmers who only engage in planting but not breeding. The effect of neighbor’s average breeding scale on the substitution of manure for chemical fertilizer is more obvious for small farmland scale farmers. Therefore, under the realistic background that the relationship between planting and breeding is becoming increasingly distant, optimizing the distribution of planting and breeding in the village and promoting the combination of planting and breeding among neighbors within village will be an important channel to promote the substitution of manure for chemical fertilizer and reconstruct the energy cycle of agriculture and animal husbandry.