Will neighbor’s livestock breeding promote the use of manure for farmers as a substitute for chemical fertilizer?

A combination of planting and breeding is the most basic form of agricultural recycling. It is vital to promote manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer to improve agricultural environment protection and sustainable agricultural development. From the perspective of manure accessibility, a theoretical framework was established to analyze the effects of neighbors’ average breeding scale on farmers’ manure and chemical fertilizer usage behaviors. A high-dimensional fixed-effect model was applied to identify these effects based on National Fixed Point Survey Data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China from 2011 to 2018. The results demonstrated that neighbor breeding effectively encouraged farmers to use manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer, which remained robust when using the first-order lag term of the core variable considering endogeneity, performing sub-sample and winsorizing tests, and replacing explained variables. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the livestock and poultry prohibition zone policy implemented in 2014 undermined the effect of neighbor breeding on manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer. The improvement in neighbors’ average breeding scale in the village effectively promoted the use of manure as a substitute for fertilizer for farmers only engaged in planting but not in livestock breeding, while it was not effective for farmers engaged in both planting and livestock breeding. The effect of neighbors’ average breeding scale on manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer was more obvious for small farmland-scale farmers. Therefore, considering that the relationship between planting and livestock breeding is becoming increasingly distant, optimizing the distribution of planting and livestock breeding in the village and promoting the combination of planting and livestock breeding among neighbors within the village will be important channels to promote manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizer and reconstruct the energy cycle of crop and livestock production system.