经营规模、草畜耦合对牧户生产技术效率的影响OA

As a pillar industry in the pastoral and agro pastoral regions of China,animal husbandry plays an essential role in ensuring national food security,ecological security,and income growth for herding households.With the rapid expansion of large-scale livestock production in pastoral areas,tensions between scale enlargement and production efficiency,as well as conflicts between grassland carrying capacity and livestock development,have become increasingly pronounced.Balancing production improvement with ecological protection has therefore become an urgent demand for the sustainable development of the pastoral sector.Based on survey data from 1 374 herding households,this study used a stochastic frontier production function(SFA)to estimate production technical efficiency and combined Tobit regression with a mediation effect model to examine the effects of operation scale and forage and livestock coupling on production efficiency.Robustness and heterogeneity tests were further conducted to verify the reliability of the results.The results showed that the average technical efficiency of the sampled households was 0.58,indicating a moderate to low level with substantial room for improvement.Technical efficiency was higher in the Gannan agro pastoral ecotone than in the pastoral areas of Hexi and Qinghai.Operation scale had a significant inverted U-shaped effect on technical efficiency.Moderate expansion of production scale improved efficiency by optimizing factor allocation,whereas excessive expansion reduced efficiency because of rising management costs and resource misallocation.Forage and livestock coupling also played a significant mediating role,not only directly enhancing production technical efficiency but also alleviating tensions between forage resources and livestock production.These findings suggest that promoting appropriately scaled operations,strengthening forage and livestock coupling,enhancing technical service support,and implementing region specific policies are essential for achieving coordinated improvements in production efficiency and ecological sustainability in pastoral animal husbandry.