Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Intelligent agricultural machinery is a strategic equipment for reshaping agricultural production and safeguarding national food security. Based on survey data of 858 large-scale rice farming producers in Jiangxi Province, this paper measures their digital literacy via the entropy method, and empirically analyzes its impact on intelligent agricultural machinery adoption with the Ordered Probit and mediating effect models. The results show that digital literacy significantly promotes the adoption and selection of more intelligent agricultural machinery, with social networks and cognitive level playing mediating role. The heterogeneity analysis revealed that the digital literacy empowerment effect exhibited significant variations due to differences in resource endowments among large-scale rice farming producers. Villages with shorter distances to townships showed significantly higher increases in digital literacy empowerment compared to those with longer distances.Part-time farming Type Ⅰ entities, with an agricultural income proportion between 50% and 90%, exhibit the strongest driving effect of digital literacy. Finally, targeted suggestions are proposed to improve digital literacy, smooth the transmission chain and implement differentiated policies, so as to boost the application of intelligent agricultural machinery and advance the coordinated development of agricultural modernization and digitalization.</p>