Impact of Well-Facilitated Farmland Construction on Farmers’ Adoption Behavior of Improved Agricultural Machinery

Abstract

Well-facilitated farmland construction provides a material foundation for the application of improved agricultural machinery, and the in-depth integration of the two can contribute to a new breakthrough in improving grain yield per unit area. Based on 371 farm household survey samples from Heilongjiang Province, this study employed the Poisson regression model, mediation pathway test model, and moderating effect model to explore the effect of well-facilitated farmland construction on farm households’ adoption behavior of improved agricultural machinery. The main finding shows that well-facilitated farmland construction can significantly promote farm households’ adoption behavior of improved agricultural machinery, and this conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. In terms of the heterogeneous impact of project types on adoption behavior, farmland road construction is the only type that generates a significant positive effect on adoption, while drainage facility construction and shelterbelt construction show significant negative effects; the other five types, including irrigation facility construction, gully erosion control, power facility construction, soil fertility amelioration, and farmland morphology remediation, have no statistically significant impacts. This study preliminarily identifies that the farmers’ organization level serves as a potential mediation pathway through which well-facilitated farmland construction facilitates farmers’ adoption of improved agricultural machinery, and both farmland fragmentation and poor traffic conditions exert significant negative moderating effects. In the future, machinery-oriented differentiated construction should be promoted based on local conditions, the farmers’ organization level should be improved, and targeted measures should be adopted to address farmland endowment constraints; this has the potential to further enhance the policy precision and implementation efficiency of well-facilitated farmland construction.