Increasing agricultural operating income is not only an important step in improving agricultural work for farmers in the new era, but is also a powerful way to promote rural revitalization. To improve our understanding of the high-quality development of agriculture in China, the factors limiting agricultural income and the impact of the level of agricultural mechanization on agricultural production and income and its mechanism were analysed. Based on field survey data on farmers, this study analysed the influence of agricultural mechanization level on agricultural production and income by utilizing a sample-modified endogenous merging model and a threshold effect model. The level of mechanization has a significant positive impact on the cost, output value, income and return rate of all types of crops. For every 1% increase in the level of mechanization, the yields of all crops, grain crops and cash crops increase by 1.2151, 1.5941 and 0.4351%, respectively. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the level of mechanization has a certain threshold effect on income, with a greater effect occurring after the threshold. A test of action mechanism shows that the mechanization level can increase income via a factor intensification path and quality improvement path, with the partial mediation effects of the two paths being 28.8 and 27.4%, respectively. It is recommended to increase subsidies to purchase agricultural machinery, research and promote machinery suitable for cash crops, increase the level of socialized agricultural services, and improve the ability of farmers to apply novel agricultural machinery and tools so as to increase their operating profits.

As the core component of agricultural development projects, high-standard farmland construction is a reliable measure of agricultural production, and can be used to improve the economy in rural areas. Based on provincial panel data, this paper adopts the continuous difference-in-differences (DID) method to analyze the impact of China’s high-standard basic farmland construction policy on the incidence of rural poverty and its mechanisms. The results show that this policy can significantly reduce the incidence of rural poverty by 7.4%, and if, after using robust standard error and bootstrap sampling 1000 times for a robustness test, the regression results are still robust, this also shows that this inhibitory effect is stable and persistent. It can be seen from a heterogeneity analysis that the implementation of the policy has a more significant effect on poverty reduction in areas with a higher incidence of rural poverty and a larger scale of land remediation, as well as areas in the eastern and western regions. A mechanism analysis shows that natural disasters, output value and technological progress play a partial intermediary role in the poverty reduction effects of high-standard basic farmland construction policy, and the intermediary effects are 5.79%, 44.03%, and 14.13%, respectively. This paper suggests that we should continue to promote the construction of high-standard basic farmland, explore suitable construction modes of high-standard basic farmland for different regions, continuously promote the process of agricultural modernization, and broaden the ways through which rural residents are able to accumulate capital to promote rural poverty reduction and revitalization.

This study calculates the effect of different types of land circulation on farmers’ decision-making regarding agricultural planting structure, using field survey data involving 1,120 households in Hubei province, China, and PSM (propensity score matching) and GPSM (general propensity score matching) methods. Results from PSM showed that land circulation could significantly increase farmers’ decisions to plant food crops, which confirms the positive effect of rural land circulation on the “grain orientation” of crop planting structure. Results from GPSM further indicate that the total land circulation, the paddy land circulation, and the dry land circulation all have significantly positive effects on planting structure adjustment towards “grain orientation.” Additionally, planting structure adjustment towards “grain orientation” increases as the scale of land circulation increases, and the former shows a higher rate of increase than the latter, which confirms that rural land circulation facilitates an adjustment in structure towards planting food crops.

Based on the survey data of 2680 rural households in Hubei Province and the Family Life Cycle Model by Glick, this paper uses the Alkire -Foster multidimensional poverty method to measure the multidimensional poverty of households in different stages of family life cycle, and then analyzes the multi-dimensional poverty of rural households. Results found that the beginning stage has the least influence on the multi-dimensional poverty of farmers, followed by the declining stage, the mature stage and the expansive stage, while the growing stage the most influential effect. Therefore, education, training and non-agriculture activities have significant effect on multi-dimensional poverty. Therefore, the government should focus the anti-poverty policy on the families in the middle of the life cycle, reinforce vocational training among the farmers and provide more non-farming vocations to effectively reduce multi-dimensional poverty of farmers.

Agricultural scale operations and industrialization promote the transfer of the rural labor force to the industry sector, and the non-farm employment of farmers plays a great role in increasing their income and reducing poverty. It is of great significance to explore the non-farm employment of farmers for the governance of relative poverty and the achievement of common prosperity. The propensity score matching (PSM) and generalized propensity score matching (GPSM) were used to analyze the impact of rural land transfer on farm households’ non-farm employment. According to the PSM estimation, compared to the farmers’ land not transferred, the rural land transfer significantly increased the proportion of non-farm employment personnel in farm households and the months of per year non-farm employment per person. The total land transfer, paddy land transfer and dry land transfer could significantly increase the proportion of non-farm employment personnel in farm households by 0.074, 0.029 and 0.085 units, respectively, and could significantly increase the months of per year non-farm employment per person by 0.604, 0.394 and 0.617 units, respectively. According to the GPSM estimation, different types of rural land transfer areas have significant positive effects on the proportion of non-farm workers and the months of per year non-farm employment per person, and show an obvious increasing trend of returns to scale, that is, the proportion of non-farm workers and the months of per year non-farm employment per person of farmers are higher than the increase in rural land transfer area. Additionally, the return to scale effect of dry land transfer area is more obvious. In order to raise the income of farm households and narrow the gap between urban and rural areas, the land transfer system can be further improved, urbanization with the county town as an important carrier can be vigorously promoted, the participation of farm households in non-farm employment in the local area can be promoted and the support policy system for non-farm employment of rural labor force can be improved.