Does Digital Literacy Increase Farmers’ Willingness to Adopt Livestock Manure Resource Utilization Modes: An Empirical Study from China

Enhancing farmers’ digital literacy is both an inevitable requirement for adapting to the digital age and an important measure for promoting the sustainable development of livestock and poultry manure resource utilization. This study surveyed and obtained data from 1047 farm households in Ningxia and Gansu, two provinces in China that have long implemented livestock manure resource utilization policies, from December 2023 to January 2024, and employed the binary probit model to analyze how digital literacy influences farmers’ willingness to adopt two livestock manure resource utilization modes, as well as to analyze the moderating role of three policy regulations. This paper also explores the heterogeneous results in different village forms and income groups. The results are as follows: (1) Digital literacy significantly and positively impacts farmers’ willingness to adopt both the “household collection” mode and the “livestock community” mode. For every one-unit increase in a farmer’s digital literacy, the probability of farmers’ willingness to adopt the “household collection” mode rises by 22 percentage points, and the probability of farmers’ willingness to adopt the “livestock community” mode rises by 19.8 percentage points. After endogeneity tests and robustness checks, the conclusion still holds. (2) Mechanism analysis results indicate that guiding policy and incentive policy have a positive moderation effect on the link between digital literacy and the willingness to adopt the “household collection” mode. Meanwhile, incentive policy also positively moderates the relationship between digital literacy and the willingness to adopt the “livestock community” mode. (3) Heterogeneity analysis results show that the positive effect of digital literacy on farmers’ willingness to adopt two livestock manure resource utilization modes is stronger in “tight-knit society” rural areas and in low-income households. (4) In further discussion, we find that digital literacy removes the information barriers for farmers, facilitating the conversion of willingness into behavior. The value of this study is as follows: this paper provides new insights for the promotion of livestock and poultry manure resource utilization policies in countries and regions similar to the development process of northwest China. Therefore, enhancing farmers’ digital literacy in a targeted way, strengthening the promotion of grassroots policies on livestock manure resource utilization, formulating diversified ecological compensation schemes, and establishing limited supervision and penalty rules can boost farmers’ willingness to adopt manure resource utilization models.