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ABSTRACTThe empirical literature on farmer cooperatives is now fast emerging and developing in the areas of performance, ownership and governance, finance, and member attitude. We discuss 56 peer‐reviewed publications to illustrate the main findings and conclusions while outlining challenges and opportunities for future research. Generally, cooperative membership is found to positively impact price, yield, input adoption, income, and other indicators of member performance, yet there is growing evidence of an uneven distribution of benefits for small and large producers. In terms of structure, evidence of a causal relationship of ownership and governance to performance has been elusive, yet there are now many findings of inherent equity and long‐term debt constraints, often in the context of consolidation to drive scale and scope economies. Further inefficiency is observed to be driven by increased heterogeneity in member attitudes and objectives, in particular in terms of commitment and participation. Thus, overall, empirical work portrays farmer cooperatives as flawed and complex business organizations which nonetheless have a strong positive impact on its members. While applied research may progress in various directions, a general improvement in empirical methodologies is needed to allow robust analysis of mixed objectives in dynamic environments.

AbstractFollowing implementation of the Agricultural Cooperative Law in July 2007, the number of cooperatives increased dramatically, as did the related research in China. The objective of this paper is to describe articles written in Chinese and published in the top six Chinese Agricultural Economics journals between 2007 and 2017, identify research trends and issues, generate observations, and provide insights for future research. A secondary objective is to introduce to the non‐Chinese speaking world a literature written by Chinese scholars as they view the emergence of this new organizational form in the agricultural sector. Our interest is to illustrate Chinese cooperative literature within two general approaches: articles which address agricultural cooperatives' inter‐firm coordination issues and articles which study the mechanism design which we call intra‐firm coordination. A total of 443 articles were reviewed, 163 dealing with inter‐firm coordination and 280 with intra‐firm coordination. The inter‐firm coordination articles focused on firm coordination mechanisms and formal institutions such as cooperative law, accounting rules, financial markets, and government support. Intra‐firm coordination articles focused on organization design, cooperative governance, relationships between members and cooperative, property rights, and hierarchical structures with embedded principal–agent issues. We conclude with observations about trends, quality, and the cooperative future and also propose useful research fields for Chinese scholars.

Abstract
Topsoil erosion and mass soil losses from hillslopes have negatively affected water quality, vegetation health, local ecosystems, and livelihood. Studies have stated the effectiveness of vegetation in significantly reducing top-soil erosion and enhancing slope stability. This study aims to better understand the application of erosional models in Haiyuan of Ningxia, a semi-arid region of China. The study site is comprised of 20 experimental plots with 11 vegetation covers and 5 slope gradients in design, which were compared to the benchmark of bare land with each slope gradient. Meteorological data and soil hydraulic measurements were collected from 2005 to 2012, and runoff and sediment load were measured by concrete basins at the base of the slopes, which mainly occurred during the summer storms. Multi-plots provide different combinations of vegetation covers and slopes to identify the driving factors of topsoil erosion during rainfall-runoff events and to examine the threshold behavior of their inter-relationship. In order to determine which models were most applicable to this area, the results of RUSLE and CSLE were applied to the data and compared to the known results.