Does agricultural knowledge technical training promote adoption of sustainable agricultural practices?

The promotion and adoption of sustainable agricultural practices is an important issue in China’s agricultural development policy, particularly because it offers a path to protecting land and water resources to ensure food security. Despite tremendous efforts in encouraging farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs), adoption has remained low. The lack of relevant information on the use and benefits of these SAPs has been recognized as a major constraint limiting their adoption. Agricultural knowledge and technology training (AKT) could be leveraged to bridge this gap to increase their adoption. Given the paucity of evidence, this study investigates the impact of participation in AKT on SAPs using data on a sample of farmers from Sichuan province of China. We apply the Endogenous-treatment Poisson regression to account for sample selection bias. The empirical results reveal that AKT improved the adoption intensity of SAPs by 74.6%, indicating that policy makers and related stakeholders should provide more agricultural schooling and training to improve farmers’ human capital endowment. These findings have implication on the provision of support for the development of rural policies to promote internet access and basic infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of these multiple sustainable practices.