Agricultural mechanization, agricultural mechanization services and technical efficiency of grain production:From the perspective of population aging

Based on the data of 47 villages in Heilongjiang Province, this paper measures the technical efficiency of farmers’ grain production, and empirically analyzes the influence of agricultural machinery services（AMS） on the technical efficiency of farmers through stochastic frontier analysis and multivalued treatment effect model. The results show that: The average technical efficiency of farmers’ grain production in Heilongjiang Province is 57.2%, which still has room to improve. AMS hasn’t significantly improved the technical efficiency of aging farmers, which non-aging farmers can benefit more from AMS. AMS keeps aging farmers in agricultural production which conducts labor complemental effect and weakens the negative impact of population aging. Aging farmers tend to undertake more agricultural production work which makes the cost of transferring labor between different plots higher and the fragment of land’s more restraining the AMS’s positive effect at sowing and harvesting stage. While developing AMS and expanding the scale of service operations, it is necessary to insist farmer household as production unit, improve the land mechanization and rural inclusive finance to make more credit opportunities of farmers and mitigate the negative shock of population aging.