Eco-compensation for Farmers’ cultivated land protection based on Field-Habitus theory

• A study of WTA integrates capital endowment and eco-cognition in field-habitat theory. • Key drivers of farmer participation in CLP programs include capital and eco-cognition. • Willingness for CLP is sensitive to income-labor ratios, reflecting risk perceptions. • Fertilizer and pesticide reduction are reliable eco-compensation indicators. • Differentiated compensation policies are needed to boost participation in CLP. Agricultural nonpoint pollution (ANP) increasingly threatens cultivated land sustainability, necessitating precise eco-compensation mechanisms to incentivize farmers’ adoption of cultivated land protection (CLP) practices. Using choice experiment and a random parameter logit model with 600 farmers in Changde City, China, this study integrates capital-habitus framework to analyze willingness to accept compensation (WTA) drivers. The results reveal that: (1) Key CLP practices, reducing chemical fertilizer or pesticide application, adopting soil testing-fertilization technology, full waste recycling, income and ecological awareness, significantly increase farmers’ WTA for CLP; (2) Capital endowment critically influenced preferences: households with higher proportions of laborers and greater reliance on kinship networks exhibited reduced compensation acceptance tendencies. Conversely, agricultural producers who participated in a greater number of agrotechnical training courses were significantly more willing to engage in CLP compensation practices. (3) The total eco-compensation for CLP ranges from RMB 3393.17/hm 2 to RMB 5343.17/hm 2 . Moreover, different selection attributes correspond to different eco-compensation amounts. This study recommends implementing tiered compensation schemes with bundled incentives, augmenting farmers’ capital endowments, and raising ecological cognition to optimize engagement in arable land protection. The proposed framework offers a transferable paradigm for harmonizing agricultural productivity with environmental stewardship in smallholder-dominated agricultural systems, providing actionable insights for policy formulation in China and other developing regions facing the productivity-ecosystem preservation preservation trade-off.