• Reveals associative relationships among the different farmland quality protection behaviors of farmer households. • Examines the effect of operational scale on farmer households’ farmland quality protection behaviors. • Identifies farmers’ subjective perceived benefits as a key mediating mechanism. • Provides empirical support and policy insights for enhancing farmland quality. The effect of the scale of operation expansion on farmers’ adoption of farmland quality protection behaviors remains a contested issue. Focusing on agricultural production’s front-end and back-end, this study selected crop rotation and fallow behavior and straw return behavior to jointly characterize farm households’ farmland quality protection behaviors and examine the correlation between the two behaviors. Using stratified random sampling data from 2973 farm households across 50 counties in 10 Chinese provinces (2019 China Rural Revitalization Survey). By constructing simultaneous bivariate Probit and IV-Probit models, the study examines the influence mechanism of the scale of operation on farmers’ farmland quality protection behaviors, analyzing the mediating role of perceived ecological benefits in this relationship. Findings indicate: (1) There exists a significant complementary effect between farmers’ crop rotation and fallow behavior and straw return behavior; (2) The scale of operation exerts a non-linear effect on both types of protection behavior, initially promoting and subsequently inhibiting them, with this effect remaining robust even after accounting for endogeneity; (3) The scale of operation not only directly influences protection behaviors but also exerts an indirect effect by shaping farmers’ perceptions of ecological benefits. Therefore, it is recommended to coordinate incentive policies for crop rotation and fallow behavior with straw return, optimize the support system for large-scale farming operations to mitigate adverse effects arising from excessive or insufficient scale, and establish a tripartite coordination mechanism integrating policy-technology-extension system services to enhance farmers’ awareness of the ecological benefits of soil protection measures.
Chang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.