The Green Productivity Effect of Agricultural New Quality Productive Forces—Evidence from Provincial Panel Data and Farm Household Surveys

Developing agricultural new quality productive forces (NQP) is an important pathway to promoting the green transformation of agriculture. This study constructs an evaluation indicator system for NQP from three dimensions: new quality workers (NQW), new quality means of labor (NQML), and new quality objects of labor (NQOL). Using panel data from 30 provinces in China for 2011–2023 and survey data from 533 farm households in Sichuan Province in 2024, it employs a two-way fixed effects model, a spatial Durbin model (SDM), and a threshold model to examine the relationships between NQP and agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP), and between farm-level new quality productive forces (FNQP) and green production behavior (GB), respectively. The findings show that NQP are significantly positively associated with AGTFP and exhibit certain spatial associations; FNQP are significantly positively associated with GB, indicating that production factor quality is closely associated with farmers’ green production practices; the threshold analysis suggests a stronger positive association between FNQP and GB among farmers with higher digital information analysis ability (DIAA). The study reveals the links between production factor quality and agricultural green development (AGD) at the levels of regional productivity and farmer behavior, providing empirical evidence for coordinating the development of knowledge and skills, technological equipment, and production conditions, and for providing targeted training in information ability.