Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General

 Very interesting article that analyses the influence of two conceptual variables: family identity and place identity on environmental behavior of farmers; Article is well structured, the concepts well explained and nice econometrically analyzed

Some remarks to improve the article

introduction

There is more theoretical and empirical work on farmers’ behavior w.r.t. environmental protection, in particular in Europe where agri-environmental measures are very common and thus the uptake of these measures are much studied. It would be good also to consult that literature in order to give the article a more international dimension (and where needed to contrast the Chinese approach). There is certainly also literature that has studied family linked variables as well location variableso n the adoption of agri-environmental measures (see among others Determinants of the willingness of Belgian farmers to participate in agri-environmental measures

Isabel Vanslembrouck, Guido Van Huylenbroeck (UGent) and Wim Verbeke (UGent)

(2002) JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS. 53(3). p.489-511

It would also be good to describe in the introduction the Chinese environmental policy for farmers in order to give context to the article (and later to situate the variables chosen to measure EPB)

l. 64: leading to a conflict between economic theory and empirical evidence: this is a dangerous sentence. Authors seem to reduce economic theory to economic profit analysis. Economic sciences and theory of course is much broader and takes into account different variables of rational behavior and indeed not only profit explains behavior but a lot of other variables (as this article, that to my opinion is an economic theory article shows !)

l. 100 : In this paragraph  more literature than only Chinese one could be used

l. 113: family economic interest: also here authors reduce family interest to economic interest: this will be an important driver but e.g. also the persistence of the farm, keeping the land, succession within the family,  and so on maybe important family drivers

l.115: chines family value is put against western individualism. I do not think this is true as also in US and EU family farming is very important (> 90 %) and the same drivers play. I think a more important difference is peasant economy in China versus more market oriented economy in US/EU

Section 3: I would start this section with a theoretical/conceptual model and the hypotheses and how you define EPB, FI and PI

Table 2: apparently EPB is measured by the chance in pesticide and fertilizer use over 1 year; It is oK but also puts a limitation. You should explain this in the text as maybe there are occasional reasons for the difference and it is not an intentional behavior or trend of the farmer

Table 2 and 3: provide also the constructed (composed variable) as you use the average variables (and later the sum of table 2 variables)

Table 4 and 5: not very clear what is the difference and whether it is really useful to have two models (one based on the average of the three variables and the other based on the sum) : to my opinion this is exactly the same (as the difference is only that table 4 dependent variable is the same as table 5 dependent variable divided by a fix number 3), so it is not a robustness test; it also do not add anything to the article, so skip this part (making the article shorter!)

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Nice article, very well organized and written. Different parts of the article are written in the form of a professional scientific article and have a good structure in its body. The main limitation of this article is the explanation and justification of the research findings. For example, the article found that improving family identity has a significant negative effect on farmers' EPB, while improving place identity can significantly improve farmers' EPB. The explanation of the second finding is poorly done, for a better explanation of the finding, refer to the discussions on the ontology of place (place of natural resources, farm bed and ecosystem, and nature in general). The conclusion section of the following resource is useful: Hardware and software remediation technologies for water resources pollution. Methods for bioremediation of water and wastewater pollution,

Use the word gender instead of the word in table 5

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx