How agricultural contracting services are reshaping small-scale household farming in China

This study examines the development of the ACS industry by taking the Agricultural Machinery Service (AMS) industry as a case study and discussing its impacts on small-scale household producers. Drawing upon the theory of ‘appropriationism’, this article shows that, by replacing family labor input, AMS providers take a share of the total agricultural income. As family labor input decreases, the producers are increasingly marginalized in the distribution of agricultural income. Even if small-scale household producers still retain small plots of land, they have increasingly lost control over the farming process and become increasingly subsumed to capitalism.