**1. Introduction**

The traditional production of small farmers in rural China has led to low agricultural production efficiency. In order to improve the efficiency of agricultural production, boost rural economy and achieve agricultural modernization in China, the Chinese government has been attaching great importance to encouraging the development of new agricultural operating entities, such as family farms. The Ministry of Agriculture issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development of Family Farms" document in 2014, stating that the family farm mode is conducive to form moderate scale operations, which has played an important role in developing modern agriculture; therefore, it is of great importance to develop family farms in China. Subsequently, the No. 1 Central Documents, from 2015 to 2017, stipulated a series of measures to support the development of new agricultural operating entities, which created a nice social environment for the founding and developing of family farms. In 2019, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on Promoting the Organic Connection of Small Farmers and Modern Agriculture Development", which clearly proposed and clarified a family farm cultivation plan. The "High-Quality Development Plan for New Types of Agricultural Entities and Service Entities (2020–2022)", compiled by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2020, set the goal that the number of family farms in China will reach 1 million by 2022.

Under the guidance and support of government policies, the family farms in China have gained initial achievements, the number of which has been increasing every year.

**Citation:** Chen, Z.; Meng, Q.; Yan, K.; Xu, R. The Analysis of Family Farm Efficiency and Its Influencing Factors: Evidence from Rural China. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 487. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/land11040487

Academic Editors: Yongsheng Wang, Qi Wen, Dazhuan Ge and Bangbang Zhang

Received: 24 February 2022 Accepted: 24 March 2022 Published: 27 March 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China, the number of family farms in China over quadrupled from about 139,000 in 2014 to 600,000 in 2018. However, although the number of family farms increased by 461,000 households, the growth rate declined year by year after 2015. The chain growth rate of family farms was initially 146.8% in 2015, followed by 29.7% in 2016, further decreased to 23.4% in 2017, and eventually fell to 9.29% in 2018. Another characteristic that should not be ignored is that most family farms in China are in a single type of planting or breeding operation. Among all family farms existing in any year between 2014–2018, the planting family farms account for the largest proportion, followed by breeding family farms. For example, in 2018, the planting, breeding, fishery, planting and breeding, and other types of family farms accounted for 62.7%, 17.8%, 5.3%, 11.6% and 2.6%, respectively, and similar distributions can be observed in other years.

Although we have witnessed an initial development of family farms in China, we have to admit that the total number of family farms is still minor. According to the data of the third agricultural census for China, the number of family farms only accounts for 0.2% of China's agricultural total households. In comparison to the traditional Chinese small farms, family farms have the characteristics of family-based production unit and scale operation [1], and they have been proved to be the most efficient mode in current agricultural production [2,3]. Therefore, it is of great significance to figure out how to improve the efficiency of family farms so as to maximize their functions in driving agricultural economic development. In order to promote the development of family farms, we have to answer the following questions: what is the actual operating efficiency of family farms in China? What are the factors that affect the efficiency of family farms? What are the differences in the efficiency and the influencing factors of family farms in different regions and different operation types?

### *1.1. Literature Review and Research Hypothesis*

#### 1.1.1. Family Farm Efficiency

Scholars have conducted a great amount of research on the efficiency of family farms. Many scholars confirmed that, through empirical analysis, the efficiency of family farms in China is not high [4–7], and the conclusions drawn from the decomposition of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency varies. Qian and Li [4] conducted a DEA measurement and analysis of the efficiency of different types of family farms in Songjiang, Shanghai; they found that the efficiency of family farms is not high at 0.3841, and planting-andbreeding family farms have the highest efficiency compared to pure-grain-planting family farms and machine-farming family farms. Han et al. [5] argued that there are many DEA ineffectiveness units in 62 households of fruit-and-vegetable family farms in Zhejiang Province, and the average pure technical efficiency is greater than their scale efficiency. Li et al. [6] calculated that the technical efficiency of 234 family farms in Shandong Province was only 0.170, and the low value was attributed to the relatively insufficient pure technical efficiency rather than scale efficiency. The planting-and-breeding family farms had the highest efficiency, while pure-planting family farms were the least efficient. The research of Gao et al. [8] proved that the technical efficiency of family farms depends more on scale efficiency, while the pure technical efficiency is low.

#### **Hypothesis 1 (H1).** *The efficiency of family farms in China is low.*
