Research on the use of digital finance and the adoption of green control techniques by family farms in China

Green control techniques are conducive to ensuring the quality and safety of agricultural products, the ecological environment and agricultural production in China, while the credit constraints of traditional financial services make it difficult for them to be successfully promoted. However, the differences between digital financial services and traditional financial services have not been considered in the existing research, and the impact of digital financial use on farmers ‘adoption of green control techniques is rarely discussed from a micro perspective. Taking 441 family farms in Shandong and Henna provinces as an example, this paper adopts the mediating effect model to investigate the influence and mechanism of digital finance on the adoption of green control techniques in family farms and addresses possible endogeneity problems with the help of the instrumental variable method. It is found that the use of digital finance has a positive impact not only on the adoption of green control techniques in family farms but also on the adoption of green control techniques in family farms through three transmission mechanisms: improving credit availability, promoting information acquisition and enhancing social trust. This approach not only helps enrich the research on digital finance and clarify the differences between digital financial services and traditional financial services but also provides theoretical support for making full use of the development opportunity of digital finance to promote farmers to adopt green control techniques and ultimately achieve sustainable agricultural development. •Analyze the impact of digital finance on family farms' green control techniques adoption.•The impact of digital finance includes total effect and mediation effect.•Digital finance produces mediation effect by credit availability and other two variables.•Provide theoretical support for using digital finance to promote agriculture green development.