Does Agricultural Production Trusteeship Promote Pesticide Reduction? A Case Study of Rice Farmers in Sichuan Province, China

Under the dual pressures of ensuring food security and advancing the green transformation of agriculture, effectively guiding farmers toward pesticide reduction has become a core issue in China’s sustainable agricultural development. As a new form of agricultural socialized service, agricultural production trusteeship offers a potential solution to the challenge of farmers’ excessive pesticide input through specialized services. Based on the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method, this study employs micro-level survey data from 978 rice-growing farmers in Sichuan Province, China, to empirically examine the impact of agricultural production trusteeship on farmers’ pesticide reduction. The findings are as follows: (1) Agricultural production trusteeship significantly promotes pesticide reduction among farmers. (2) The moderating effect results of land endowments indicate that both cultivation scale and land fragmentation exert a negative moderating effect on the relationship between agricultural production trusteeship and farmers’ pesticide reduction. (3) The heterogeneity results reveal that, from the perspective of trusteeship mode selection, full-process trusteeship is more effective in promoting farmers’ pesticide reduction. From the perspective of farmer differentiation, the pesticide-reducing effect of agricultural production trusteeship is more pronounced among non-farm-dominated farmers and middle and new generation farmers. Accordingly, this study proposes that agricultural production trusteeship may serve as a promising policy pathway for pesticide reduction initiatives, and that differentiated promotion strategies and incentive mechanisms are recommended to be implemented based on farmer types and land endowments.