Abstract:The CPC Central Committee proposed to develop “family farms” in the beginning of 2013, and a heat discussion ensued. Mainstream opinions placed emphasis on larger size of the family farms and large-scale transference of the lands so as to heighten the productivity of both labor and land. The catchphrase, “family farms”, is inspired by and loaded with the imagination of America’s agriculture. This paper argues that the proposal fails to go by the economic logic of agricultural modernization demonstrated by the agricultural economic history of the world. It mistakenly imposes the American model based on “a few people with a lot of land” on the Chinese reality of “a lot of people with a few land” and applies the economics of the mechanic era to agriculture. It also represents a misunderstanding of present-day American agricultural economy which has actually been dominated by large, enterprise-like farms for a long time. The dominant logic behind the scale of American agriculture modernization is to save labor force. The key point in the Chinese small-and-refined model characterized by “double intensiveness of labor and capital” which China has carried on with in the past thirty years is to save land resources. The large-and-coarse American model does not fit in with Chinese agricultural reality and still less with the theoretical insight that has been gained from the long tradition of small-scale family-farming economy. The widespread growth of small-and-refined family farms over the past thirty years is the correct way to develop Chinese agriculture.
Keywords:people-land relationship, large-and-coarse American farming model, small-and-refined Chinese farming model,appropriate scale, theory of small-scale agricultural economy