Abstract: Family farms are an important mainstay in promoting appropriate scale operations in Chinese agriculture, and it is of great significance to pay attention to the conditions for the selection of the scope of their operations. Based on the panel data of family farms in 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) across China from 2014 to 2018, this paper adopts a two-way fixed-effects model to empirically analyze the impact of the knowledge acquisition of farmers on the scope of farm operations. The results show that those family farms whose owners have received more types of training have a wider scope of operation, i.e., they have a higher probability of choosing the scope of operation of“planting + breeding”than the scope of“crop planting”. Further analysis reveals that these findings hold true even after taking into account the effects of characteristics such as the farm’s resource-sharing capacity, the time trend of the farm’s growth, the farm’s exposure to risky environments, and the external environment in which the farm operates. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the more knowledge and skills are required to expand the business scope of a farm, the more prominent the ability to share farm resources, and the greater the effect of training types. The mechanism test indicates that the type of training affects production behavior mainly by influencing the specialized knowledge and technology owned by farm owners. On this basis, the cultivation of high-quality farmers should be intensified, the training of agricultural management subjects should be enhanced, and the content of training should be rationalized.

Key words: family farms, types of training, scope of production and operation, specialized knowledge and technology