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Digital Technology Driving Agricultural Economic Resilience: Mechanism Analysis, Empirical Test, and Policy Implications
Smart Agriculture 2026, 8(3): 203-214
Published: 01 May 2026
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Objective

Enhancing agricultural economic resilience is a critical strategic path for ensuring national food security and promoting the comprehensive implementation of rural revitalization. Against the backdrop of accelerated digital penetration in rural areas, existing research often focuses on macro-level digitalization, making it difficult to isolate the authentic contribution of digital inputs to agricultural systems. The driving effects and internal mechanisms of information and communication technology (ICT) input on agricultural economic resilience are explored in this research. Through clarifying its asymmetric impacts on resistance, recovery, and development capacities, a robust theoretical reference and empirical basis are offered for formulating differentiated digital agriculture policies that transition from traditional production modes to intelligent, resilient systems.

Methods

Based on Chinese provincial non-continuous panel data for 2012, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020, an advanced input-output (I-O) model framework was utilized. Leveraging the multi-regional input-output tables, the Leontief inverse matrix was employed to calculate the total consumption coefficient of the "Information Transmission, Software, and Information Technology Services" industry by the agricultural sector, which defined the total digital technology input value. Simultaneously, the entropy weight method was used to construct a comprehensive evaluation system for agricultural economic resilience. In terms of the econometric strategy, potential endogeneity was addressed by selecting the product of rural radio stations in 1988 and the previous year's Internet users as an instrumental variable (IV). The analysis was further supported by a 5% bilateral winsorization and a mediation effect model for rigorous empirical testing.

Results and Discussions

The empirical results demonstrated that digital technology input significantly enhanced overarching agricultural economic resilience. Benchmark regressions showed that the coefficient of ICT input was significantly positive at the 1% level, and the driving effect remained robust after correcting for endogeneity bias, which confirmed the core role of digital transformation in systemic risk management. Dimensional decomposition revealed a significant asymmetric characteristic: Digital technology strongly drives recovery capacity after exogenous shocks and developmental capacity during long-term evolution. However, its impact on the resistance dimension was relatively limited and exhibited a marginal negative effect. This reflected a potential technological dependence risk, where the system's increased sensitivity to power grids and network stability might weaken its original stress-resistance capacity during the onset of extreme risks. Furthermore, control variable analysis showed that per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and optimized planting structures promoted resilience, while the number of rural cooperatives exerted a negative influence, suggesting that some grassroots organizations suffered from insufficient digital adaptability. Mechanism analysis indicated that marketization, economic efficiency, and transport density were the primary transmission paths. Specifically, the marketization path contributed most significantly by reducing institutional transaction costs. Additionally, digital technology improved output efficiency through precision management and optimized transport logistics in synergy with physical infrastructure. Heterogeneity analysis showed that digital technology exhibited a clear "digital compensation" advantage in Western China, effectively offsetting natural resource endowment disadvantages.

Conclusions

This study confirms that digital input constitutes a new quality productive force that fundamentally strengthens the risk-resistance capacity of agricultural systems. The conclusions are summarized as follows: First, the empowerment of agricultural resilience by digital technology is characterized by a profound asymmetry. While it significantly improves the efficiency of systemic recovery and evolutionary development, it may simultaneously weaken original resistance due to intensified technological coupling and infrastructure dependence. Second, the reduction of institutional transaction costs through marketization is identified as the core mechanism for digital factors to exert their resilience-enhancing effects. The depth of the digital dividend is largely determined by the maturity of the market environment and its capacity for factor mobility. Third, the release of digital dividends in agriculture is heavily constrained by organizational adaptability. The lagging digital transformation and inherent structural rigidity of certain grassroots organizations have become the primary institutional bottlenecks restricting the conversion of digital technology inputs into practical systemic resilience. Ultimately, achieving a resilient agricultural economy requires a synergistic alignment between advanced digital production forces and modernized rural production relations.

Issue
Artificial Intelligence-Driven High-Quality Development of New-Quality Productivity in Animal Husbandry: Restraining Factors, Generation Logic and Promotion Paths
Smart Agriculture 2025, 7(1): 165-177
Published: 01 January 2025
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Significance

Developing new-quality productivity is of great significance for promoting high-quality development of animal husbandry. However, there is currently limited research on new-quality productivity in animal husbandry, and there is a lack of in-depth analysis on its connotation, characteristics, constraints, and promotion path.

Progress

This article conducts a systematic study on the high-quality development of animal husbandry productivity driven by artificial intelligence. The new-quality productivity of animal husbandry is led by cutting-edge technological innovations such as biotechnology, information technology, and green technology, with digitalization, greening, and ecologicalization as the direction of industrial upgrading. Its basic connotation is manifested as higher quality workers, more advanced labor materials, and a wider range of labor objects. Compared with traditional productivity, the new-quality productivity of animal husbandry is an advanced productivity guided by technological innovation, new development concepts, and centered on the improvement of total factor productivity. It has significant characteristics of high production efficiency, good industrial benefits, and strong sustainable development capabilities. China's new-quality productivity in animal husbandry has a good foundation for development, but it also faces constraints such as insufficient innovation in animal husbandry breeding technology, weak core competitiveness, low mechanization rate of animal husbandry, weak independent research and development capabilities of intelligent equipment, urgent demand for "machine replacement", shortcomings in the quantity and quality of animal husbandry talents, low degree of scale of animal husbandry, and limited level of intelligent management. Artificial intelligence in animal husbandry can be widely used in environmental control, precision feeding, health monitoring and disease prevention and control, supply chain optimization and other fields. Artificial intelligence, through revolutionary breakthroughs in animal husbandry technology represented by digital technology, innovative allocation of productivity factors in animal husbandry linked by data elements, and innovative allocation of productivity factors in animal husbandry adapted to the digital economy, has given birth to new-quality productivity in animal husbandry and empowered the high-quality development of animal husbandry.

Conclusions and Prospects

This article proposes a path to promote the development of new-quality productivity in animal husbandry by improving the institutional mechanism of artificial intelligence to promote the development of modern animal husbandry industry, strengthening the application of artificial intelligence in animal husbandry technology innovation and promotion, and improving the management level of artificial intelligence in the entire industry chain of animal husbandry.

Open Access Research Article Issue
Multi-scale keypoints detection and motion features extraction in dairy cows using ResNet101-ASPP network
Journal of Integrative Agriculture (JIA) 2026, 25(5): 2028-2040
Published: 19 July 2024
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Detecting keypoints in dairy cows aims to locate and track the motion trajectories of the body’s joints, which plays a crucial role in behavior analysis and lameness detection. However, real farming scenarios, characterized by occlusions and large variations in object scale may result in poor detection results. Therefore, we introduce the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module into the shallow layers network of ResNet101, designed to improve the multi-scale feature extraction capability of the model. The ASPP module enhances the robustness of recognition for different dimensional sizes and occluded keypoints using different dilatation rates in the parallel atrous convolutional layers to expand the model’s receptive field. Furthermore, seven types of motion features, including tracking up, gait symmetry, step height balance, motion speed variability, head swing amplitude, head-neck slope and back curvature are extracted simultaneously by monitoring and tracking the motion trajectory of distinct keypoints. Several of these features represent innovative extraction models and attributes, first proposed in this study. Multiple models are trained and tested on datasets containing 2,385 frames for ablation experiments. The experiments show that, in comparison with the ResNet50, MobileNet_v2_1.0, and EfficientNet-b0 backbone networks, the training error and test error of ResNet101 are reduced by 4.04–30.12 pixels and 3.81–28.14 pixels. Therefore, ResNet101 is used as the benchmark for subsequent model improvement by adding the ASPP module. The training error and test error of the ResNet101-ASPP network are reduced by 0.27 and 0.24 pixels, respectively, compared to the benchmark network. The prediction confidence improves by 1.65–2.50% at three different dairy cow object scales. In addition, the keypoints under different occlusion conditions improve considerably, especially for small-scale keypoints, demonstrating the capability of the ASPP module for multi-scale feature extraction. By analyzing the distribution of the seven features and health, mild lameness, and severe lameness in dairy cows, it is shown that all the different features play an important role in distinguishing between different levels of lameness.

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