Digital skills and knowledge as enablers: understanding farmers’ adoption of agricultural green production technologies

Agricultural green production technologies have a significant influence on advancing sustainable farming practices, contributing to emission reduction, carbon sequestration, and mitigating nonpoint source pollution. Using data from the China Land Economic Survey (2020–2022), this study employs an ordered probit modeling approach to investigate the influence of digital skills on shaping farmers’ adoption of green agricultural practices. The results demonstrate that improved digital proficiency reduces the probability of nonadoption by 4.48%, while raising the probability of adopting four types of green technologies by 0.64%. Second, the analysis confirms alleviating credit constraints, agricultural socialized services uptake, and strengthening green production awareness as core mechanisms of digital skills functioning. A central theoretical contribution of this research is systematically clarifying these mediating pathways, which enriches the innovation adoption literature with nuanced knowledge about behavioral drivers in agricultural contexts. Third, the effects of digital skills are heterogeneous across farmer demographics—stronger for those who are risk-tolerant, have lower time preferences, operate on a larger scale, and are younger. The findings provide micro-level empirical and theoretical support for the influence of human capital on fostering green technological innovation in agriculture. They also offer actionable insights for policy efforts to enhance rural digital skills by optimizing digital skills training programs for older farmers, expanding demonstration sites for green production technologies, improving rural financial markets, and promoting environmentally friendly agricultural machinery applications.