Abstract: Cultivated land is the most important resource for agricultural production development. Along with the rapid urbanization process recently, cultivated land resources in China are faced with many problems such as quantity reduction, quality decline, and ecological degradation, which means the protection and utilization methods of cultivated land need to be transformed. The implementation of land fallowing is an important means to maintain soil quality and restore soil fertility. As the direct user of cultivated land, farmers are an important subject of fallow management. Identifying the influencing factors of farmers’ willingness and behavior on fallow management and protection is of great significance for promoting the implementation of fallowing system. In this paper, a structural equation model (SEM) was set up using the sample of 12 villages of 2 towns in Xingtai, Hebei Province, China, including 4 latent variables (household characteristics, family characteristics, cognitive characteristics, awareness of the utilization of cultivated land factors).Apart from above 4 latent variables, there were another 2 latent variables (represent farmers’ willingness and behavior) and 12 observable variables (age of farmer, the Communist Party membership, village cadre status, number of family members, number of non-agricultural employments of family, family income, farmland protection responsibilities in farms’ mind, satisfaction degree of fallow policy, understanding degree of fallow land management and protection technology, farmland area, grain planting proportion, land fragmentation).This SEM was used to analyze the farmers’ willingness and behavior of the management and protection of fallow land. There are three main findings. First, economic compensation is an important factor for farmer’s choice on managing and protecting fallow land. Specifically, 26.44% of the farmers were willing to manage the fallow land without economic compensation, while 53.55% of the farmers are willing to manage fallow land with economic compensation. Second, cognitive consciousness has most important impact on willingness and behavior of the fallow land management and protection. For the farmers’ management and protection willingness, family characteristics, cognitive consciousness, status of farmland has a significant impact. For farmers’ management and protection behavior, farmers’ characteristics, family characteristics and cognitive awareness have a significant impact. Finally, the index variables including the Communist Party membership, village cadre status, number of family members, farmland protection responsibilities in farms’ mind, satisfaction degree of fallow policy, understanding degree of fallow land management-protected technology, farmland area, and grain planting proportion have a positive impact on fallow land management and protection willingness and behavior. The index variables including age of farmer, number of non-agricultural employments of family, family income, land fragmentation have a negative influence on the willingness and behavior. Based on the main findings, there are serval policy implications. First, broadening the propaganda approaches of land fallowing policy and land management and protection policy is significant to promote farmers’ choice of management and protection on fallowing cultivated land. Second, to foster enthusiasm of farmers’ spontaneous management and protection of fallowing land, it is fundamentally important to give enough compensation for them. Finally, it is also of significance to strengthen farmers’ training on the management and protection of fallow land and dig out new approaches for managing fallowing land in the future.

Key words: fallow farmland management and protection, farmers’ willingness, behavior, SEM, Xingtai