Abstract:
Participating in professional cooperatives is a new choice faced by many farmers and farmers’ satisfaction with cooperatives is an important factor affecting their participating decisions. Based a survey data of farmers participating in cooperatives in Jiangsu Province and applying the Oprobit model, this research analyzed farmers’ satisfaction with cooperatives at different income levels and explored their influencing factors. Results show that farmers’ satisfaction with professional cooperatives basically displays a normal distribution: in general, the overall satisfaction level is not very high with an average rate of 2.992. With the increase of farmers’ income, farmers’ satisfaction also improves accordingly. Research also finds that the per capita household income and the education level are important factors that positively affect farmers’ satisfaction level. The number of family members participating in agricultural production has a significant negative impact. Age, household contracted land area, annual loan amount, and government subsidy have relatively significant positive impacts, and gender has no any significant impact. When examining from the different income levels, the number of family members participating in agricultural production has a significant positive impact on farmers’ satisfaction in all groups; while the household contracted land area has a significant negative impact. Other factors have different impacts on farmers at different income levels. Therefore, this paper recommends to increase investment in rural education, to improve the income distribution system of cooperatives, to increase the efficiency of government resource distribution, and to encourage farmers to transfer land.