Organizational support is an important external force for enhancing agricultural green total factor productivity. To identify the interactive and heterogeneous effects of organizational support on agricultural green total factor productivity and investigate the mechanism of knowledge distance, using step-by-step regression method, moderating effect model, grouped regression, and recursive model for mediating effect test, this study theoretically explores and empirically verifies the effect of organizational support and knowledge distance on farmers’ promotion of agricultural green total factor productivity. The results show that: (1) strengthening organizational support can improve agricultural green total factor productivity, and a substitutive interaction exists between market-oriented organizations and government organizations. (2) Market-oriented organizations are more effective when farmers receive incremental knowledge, whereas government organizations become more influential if farmers are provided with radical knowledge. (3) Organizational support improves agricultural green total factor productivity by narrowing cognitive, spatial, and content distances. The mechanism of knowledge distance differs between incremental support and radical support. For incremental support, the mechanism of spatial distance is the most obvious, while for radical support, the mechanism of content distance is the most prominent. To enhance agricultural green total factor productivity, the rural governance system should be continuously improved and the dimensions of knowledge distance need to be narrowed.
Zhu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.