How Does the Adoption of Digital and Intelligent Technologies Affect Farmers’ Farmland Rental-In Behavior? Evidence from Grain-Growing Farmers in China

Farmland rental is an important means of optimizing agricultural land allocation and promoting appropriately scaled farming. Against the backdrop of accelerating digital and intelligent transformation in agricultural, how digital and intelligent technology (DIT) adoption relates to farmers’ farmland rental-in behavior require clear theoretical explanation and empirical validation. Using 2024 survey data from 385 grain-growing farmers in Jiangsu Province, China, this study examines the relationship between DIT adoption and farmland rental-in behavior using Probit, endogenous switching regression, IV-Probit, and conditional mixed-process models. The results show that DIT adoption is significantly and positively associated with both farmland rental-in decisions and rented-in scale. These findings remain robust across alternative samples and estimation specifications. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that this positive association is more pronounced for production-oriented than information-oriented DIT applications, for farms with larger baseline operational scales than smallholders, and for households with lower aging ratios. Mechanism analyses suggest that DIT adoption corresponds to farmland rental-in primarily through labor substitution effects and transaction cost reductions in rural land markets. This study extends farmland rental research to the context of agricultural digitalization, offering empirical insights for advancing digital agriculture, improving farmland rental markets, and fostering appropriately scaled farming operations.