Impact of household social-economic characteristics on the willingness to grow crops: A case study of jasmine growers in Fuzhou based on conservation of the agricultural heritage system

With rapid urbanization and increasing cost of farming, the jasmine planting area in Fuzhou City has been decreasing sharply and thereby severely threating the important agricultural heritage system — Fuzhou Jasmine and Tea Cultural System. Sustainability of jasmine farming lies in whether the growers have the willingness for continually planting the crop. Thus to explore planting willingness and its influencing factors was critical for developing scientific protection measures to ensure continuity of jasmine farming. In this study, data on social characteristics of jasmine planters (including age, sex, educational level, source of information, cognitive level of the functions of jasmine planters) and their economic characteristics (including current income per hectare, income position in friends and expected income per hectare) as well as planting willingness were collected using questionnaire survey and household interview. Then the general descriptive statistical method was used to analyze statistical characteristics of the data. The Binary Logistic Regression was used to analyze the relationship between the socio-economic characteristics and planting willingness of jasmine planters in order to determine the main factors influencing planting willingness. The results showed that: 1) the jasmine farmers showed a trend of aged population, and their education level was generally low. Furthermore, most information they got relied on laggard and simplex information sources. This hindered the sustainable development of jasmine farming in the study area. 2) Jasmine growers had low cognitive level of the jasmine uses, which also hindered diversified development of jasmine industries around multi-function jasmine farming. 3) The growers that planned to continue with the cultivation of jasmine slightly exceeded one half the population of jasmine farmers. The chose to continue with jasmine cultivation was because of the strong affection for jasmine after cultivation of the crop over a long time. However, jasmine farmers who wanted to stop growing the crop cited “tedious work requirement” and “low profits” as the reason for stopping. 4) The amount of information acquired by growers and the expected income per unit area were the two main factors influencing planting willingness of the farmers. In response to the situations, protection measures needed to be taken were as follows: 1) Building a sustainable mechanism, for example, to provide subsidy to jasmine planters, privilege policies for jasmine growers and start-up business funds to graduates to attract young talents to jasmine farming. 2) Promoting cooperation between enterprises and households and between households to improve income stability of jasmine farmers. 3) Developing tourism, leisure agriculture, etc. to diversify income sources based on the multi-functions of jasmine farming. 4) Improving farming efficiency by devising new production equipment that increased the income of jasmine growers. 5) Training jasmine growers in jasmine farming knowhow and technologies to strengthen self-developing ability. 6) Conducting the practice and education of Important Agricultural Heritage Systems in primary and middle schools to cultivate the love for jasmine from youthful age.