Sustainable agriculture and good governance are part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have attracted great attention from all nations around the world. A scientific metrological and knowledge map analysis was conducted on the spatial–temporal evolution, collaboration network, research hotspots, cluster labels, frontier detection, and evolution path of 2350 pieces of data in this paper. The main results show that research hotspots such as sustainable development, rural development, agriculture, and others have influenced the development of the entire research process and have evolved into larger topic cluster groups such as ecosystem service, sustainable agriculture, land consolidation, and agricultural intensification. Research frontiers such as agriculture, integrated systems, smallholder systems, rural sustainable development, and land consolidation play key roles. Based on the findings, it is necessary to focus on the UN 2030 SDGs, combine the countries’ regional development needs and reality, and further clarify and refine the topics that need to be studied and the problems that need to be solved. More scientific demonstration and more feasible measures should be adopted to jointly deal with and enhance awareness of the current problems and practical challenges and further promote practical development by cohering academic consensus and expanding and innovating the governance models from the comprehensive dimensions of economy, politics, society, culture, and ecological environment so as to achieve good agricultural and rural governance.

Agricultural labor productivity is an important indicator that reflects the sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas. Demonstration farms provide an important link between small-scale farmers and modern agriculture in mountainous area of western China, which is playing an important role in improving labor productivity. This paper focuses on using the PSM-logit model and sensitivity analysis to empirically test the causal relationship between demonstration farms and labor productivity, and a micro-large sample of 1823 family farms was adopted. The highlighted findings are as follows: the average labor productivity of the demonstration farm is 2.8 times higher than that of the non-demonstration farm. There is a significant positive correlation between demonstration farms and labor productivity. Utilizing demonstration farms, when all control variables are added, can remarkably promote farm income by CNY301458 on average. In the matched sample, and under scenarios controlling for other covariates, we saw that demonstration farms can significantly enhance the farm income of CNY285108, CNY288509, and CNY291077 on average, respectively, after taking the radius matching, the kernel matching, and the nearest neighbor matching. The research inspired us to enhance the demonstrative establishment of family farms and accelerate the rate at which comprehensive development benefits are derived from demonstration farms. The results of this research could provide a policy reference for the promotion of high-quality development and the sustainable development of family farms in China and serve as an experience reference for promoting sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas globally.

The realization of agricultural modernization inevitably requires the improvement of agricultural land productivity. Rural public science and technology services is an important driving force to improve agricultural land productivity. However, can rural public science and technology services accelerate the process of agricultural modernization by improving land productivity? This paper innovatively constructs an evaluation index system and an mediating mechanism model, measures the comprehensive index of agricultural modernization and rural public science and technology services through the global entropy method, and empirically tests the mediating effect of the mechanism of “land productivity” with the help of measurement methods such as the Sobel–Goodman test and Bootstrap test. The research results find that rural public science and technology services can positively promote agricultural modernization and pass the 1% significance level test. There is a significant mediating effect of “increasing production” in the impact of rural public science and technology services on agricultural modernization, that is, rural public science and technology services can significantly promote agricultural modernization through the mechanism of “improving land productivity”. Government intervention and economic growth are significantly positive, which can significantly promote agricultural modernization. These findings have clear policy implications: Chinese government should accelerate the filling of gaps in rural public technology services between urban and rural areas in the southwest region, empower land productivity through science and technology, and promote the transformation of agricultural scientific and technological achievements into real productive forces. This research is helpful to provide policy reference and case experience for similar areas to speed up agricultural modernization by giving full play to the mechanism of “improving land productivity” of agricultural science and technology services.