A Quantitative Analysis on the Aged Farmers' Preference Change for Labor Intensity

For investigating managerial behavior of aged farmers, this paper estimates the change in the aged farmers' preference for labor intensity and tests the hypothesis that the farmers' tolerance to high labor intensity in farm work decrease as they become older. The term “labor intensity” is defined as a technological index of job characteristics in crop production, and “preference of labor intensity” as the feeling of burden toward labor intensity.To do this, the paper identifies the age when farmers start to be strongly conscious of labor intensity, and also examines the impact of the change in the aged farmers' preference for labor intensity on the choice of crops. In this paper, we examine the case of lettuce and onion, where the former has high labor intensity, whereas the latter has low labor intensity.The results are as follows.First, it is at the age of 60 when farmers start to be strongly conscious of labor intensity and to increase the rate of the onion area cultivated relatively.Second, the change in the aged farmers' preference for labor intensity will reduce the lettuce area by 135 ares, which amount to 16% of the total decrease of lettuce area to be expected in five years.