How Digital Literacy Shapes Farmers’ Adoption of Green Agricultural Technologies: Evidence from Specialty Crop Producers in Jilin Province

In the context of accelerating digital transformation and increasing pressure for sustainable agriculture, understanding how digital capabilities shape farmers’ green production behavior has become a critical issue. This study examines how digital literacy influences the adoption of green agricultural technologies as well as the mechanisms driving this relationship, based on survey data collected from 422 ginseng farmers in Jilin Province, China. An ordered Probit model is employed, complemented by an instrumental variable approach and mediation analysis to ensure robust causal inference. The findings indicate that digital literacy plays a significant role in encouraging farmers to adopt green production technologies, and this effect remains robust after addressing potential endogeneity issues. Mechanism analysis indicates that digital literacy mainly functions by strengthening farmers’ multi-dimensional technological cognition, including technological attribute cognition, technological ecological cognition, technological economic cognition, and technological risk cognition, while the information cost channel is not supported. Interestingly, heterogeneity analysis further shows that the impact of digital literacy remains relatively consistent across different generations, farm sizes, and levels of cooperative participation. This finding suggests that digital literacy functions as a “foundational and universally effective capability”, particularly in highly specialized and regionally concentrated agricultural systems such as ginseng production. This study contributes to the existing literature by shifting the focus from information access to cognitive empowerment in explaining green technology adoption, and by refining the understanding of the boundary conditions under which digital literacy exerts uniform effects. The findings provide important implications for digital rural development policies aimed at promoting sustainable agricultural transformation.