Agricultural machinery socialization services are an important means of alleviating poverty and promoting agricultural modernization. Based on 2750 items of survey data from farmers in Henan Province, this paper empirically tests the impact and mechanism of agricultural machinery socialization service adoption on the relative poverty of farmers by using a binary logit model and mediation effect model. The results show that the adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services has a significant negative impact on the relative poverty of farmers. The reduction in natural risk plays an intermediary role in the impact of the adoption of agricultural machinery socialization services on the relative poverty of farmers. The size of the household labor force and the land operation scale affect the poverty reduction effect of agricultural machinery socialization services. It can be seen that in the relative poverty governance stage, we should improve the development of the agricultural machinery socialization service system, enhance the risk resistance of farmers, build a supporting system for farmers’ employment skills training, and encourage an orderly connection between the large-scale operation of agricultural land and the large-scale operation of services so as to fully realize the poverty reduction role of agricultural machinery socialization services.

To shed light on the sustainable development of rural areas, we study the determinants of transitions from subsistence farming into either formal agricultural employment or agricultural entrepreneurship based on a recent nationally representative survey dataset. We pay particular attention to the roles of different capital endowments broadly including human, financial, natural, social and political capital. Our results show that human, natural, social and political capital are all important determinants of rural households’ transitions to on-farm employment and entrepreneurship while financial capital plays a limited role. These findings are robust to fully controlling for off-farm transitions as part of the household occupational strategy.

Agricultural eco-efficiency (AEE) is a crucial indicator of the green development of agriculture. Agricultural socialized services (AS) provide services for the agricultural production process and they promote the effective input of production factors, such as science and technology, talent, information, and capital, into the agricultural production chain, deepening the division of labor and injecting vitality into agricultural development. We measured AEE based on field research data in Jiangxi Province, China. We also constructed an endogenous switching model to explore the impact of AS on AEE. Our results show that, based on the counterfactual assumption, the AEE increased by 13.19% among farmers who adopted the services compared to those who did not. From the perspective of scale and structural differences, the larger the scale of agricultural cultivation, the stronger the impact of AS on AEE. Furthermore, a large share of cash crops was found to inhibit the impact of AS on AEE. We also investigated whether farmers in close proximity to each other affect their neighbors through knowledge dissemination and technology spillover. The extent of the impact of AS on AEE depended on distance thresholds: it was more pronounced when we increased the distance threshold. Our results suggest that the government should improve the AS system, provide more public welfare services, and appropriately subsidize AS organizations. The AS for food crops should be emphasized; however, those for cash crops should not be ignored.