Digital transformation in agricultural practices may lead to a "digital divide" between small and large farms, owing to the characteristics and availability of digital technology. This paper sought to use a case study in Chongzhou County, Sichuan Province in China, to analyze how smallholder farmers in developing countries access such digital agriculture and share the benefits of digital agricultural transformation. Small farmers may own a larger scale farm through forming cooperatives; they are also indirectly involved in digital agriculture through agriculture outsourcing. The outsourcing market is expected to grow, which will allow for the evolution of a digital agricultural service platform, the development of a digital agricultural business organization consortium, and the continued expansion of a healthy digital ecology. This paper revealed important policy implications, stemming from the fact that the implementation of inclusive digital agriculture relies on two key shifts: (1) transformation from land scale operations to service scale operations and (2) from inclusive technological progress to inclusive organization innovation.

Developing agricultural mechanization services is commonly regarded as an important approach to pushing smallholder farmers engaging in modern agricultural production in China. However, whether smallholder farmers can benefit more from agricultural mechanization services is ambiguous. Using household-level data collected from Henan province in China, this study investigates the effect of agricultural mechanization services on the productivity of different-sized farms. The results indicate that the productivity of medium farms benefits more from agricultural mechanization services rather than small and large farms. Further analysis shows that medium farms are more likely to adopt agricultural mechanization services and reveals a positive relationship between the adoption of agricultural mechanization services and farm productivity. The higher rate of adoption of agricultural mechanization services and the related higher productivity of medium farms can be explained by the tendency of large farms to invest in self-owned agricultural machinery and the likelihood that small farms will input more labourers in wheat production. Although Chinese governments aim to develop the social service in agriculture for smallholder farmers, it seems that they do not get positive responses.

This study uses data covering 3,914 farm households, collected from Henan province in China, to investigate the links between the price of agricultural mechanization services and farmers' exit from land operation. The results indicate that the increasing price of agricultural mechanization services leads to farmers leaving land operation, especially when the high sunk costs and the long‐term breakeven period of self‐owned machinery are considered. This effect is intensified by the rapid rural–urban migration in China. Further analysis reveals that the surge in service prices reduced land renting‐in and encouraged non‐grain production. Our analysis suggests that the agricultural mechanization service market in China tends to work against the survival of smallholder farmers. However, the price of agricultural mechanization services is conducive to eliminating less‐productive farmers and cultivating new agricultural operators.

Although the literature finds that renting out farmland can increase farmer’s income, whether lessors’ subjective well-being (SWB) increases or not has been under-analysed. We use data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey to investigate the relationship between land rental transaction and farmers’ SWB. The results indicate that renting-out farmland does not increase farmers’ SWB if ignoring the types of transaction partners. Further analysis shows that lessors transacting with acquaintances have higher SWB than those transacting with non-acquaintances, and there is no difference in SWB between lessors transacting with non-acquaintances and farmers without land renting-out. This is because although lessors transacting with non-acquaintances obtain higher land rents, they lose the farmland that is the channel of investing in social capitals, which leads to less helps from kin, friends or neighbours when they encounter difficulties. Our analysis implies that lessors’ subjective welfare does not increase even if rural economy and rural residents are commonly regarded to be beneficial from land transfers.

Purpose: The purpose is to understand why contract instability occurs when small landowners lease their land to large landholders.Design/methodology/approach: The authors develop a contract theoretical model to understand the stability problem in the farmland lease contract in China, where most landowners are small landholders.Findings: Results from the doubly robust estimation method used on randomly selected interview data from 552 households in nine provinces of China indicate that contract instability can arise endogenously when large landholders sign a contract. The authors conclude that a suitable rent control regime or contract enforcement may be necessary to promote a large-scale farmland transfer in China.Originality/value: The authors develop a contract theoretical model and apply it to the land rental market in China. Data used are original and collected from farmers located in nine provinces of China.