Research on the Impact of Digital Agricultural Technologies Adoption on the Farmers’ Grain Income: The Mediating Role of “Two Scale” Farmland Use

Based on the survey dataset of 879 farm households in China’s three northeastern provinces, this study adopts an integrated empirical framework that incorporates the ordinary least squares (OLS) model, quantile regression, and mediation effect models to examine the impact of digital agricultural technology adoption on farmers’ grain income and unravel its underlying mechanism. The results indicate that: (1) Digital agricultural technologies adoption has a significant positive effect on farmers’ grain income, and this impact gradually increases with farmers’ income levels. Meanwhile, the income-increasing effect of digital agricultural technologies exhibits a threshold effect: when farmers adopt two types of digital agricultural technologies, they can achieve growth in grain income. (2) Heterogeneity analysis reveals that, in terms of operational scale, the income-enhancing effect of digital agricultural technologies adoption is significantly stronger for medium-scale farmers than for small-scale and large-scale farmers; in terms of regional distribution, the positive effect is strongest in Jilin Province, followed by Liaoning Province, and weakest in Heilongjiang Province; in terms of crop types, the positive effect is more substantial for rice growers than for maize farmers. (3) Mechanism analysis indicates that operational scale and plot scale play mediating roles in the impact of digital agricultural technologies on farmers’ grain income, with their mediating effects of approximately 5.52% and 9.66% respectively, which further clarifies that the adoption of digital agricultural technologies expands operational scale and plot scale, enables large-scale production, and thus boosts farmers’ grain income. These findings offer empirical insights into integrating smallholder farming systems with digital agriculture and provide evidence-based support for policies aimed at promoting scaled operation and facilitating the digital transformation of grain production systems.