The tea industry is an important part of China’s agricultural economy, but the industrial development challenge of “who will grow tea and how to grow it well” has become increasingly prominent. In the face of realities such as accelerating aging of the rural labor force and insufficient resource endowments of smallholder farmers, promoting the implementation and widespread adoption of agricultural socialized services has become a key path to overcoming the development dilemma of the tea industry.
Recently, the team led by Lipeng LI at Ningxia University published a research paper titled “Adoption and multidimensional effects of socialized services for tea farmers” in ENGINEERING Agriculture (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2026670). Based on 895 field survey questionnaires from tea farmers in Anhui, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces, the study used propensity score matching (PSM) and a mediation effect model to systematically analyze the influencing factors and multidimensional effects of tea farmers’ adoption of agricultural socialized services.
China’s agricultural socialized services have developed rapidly, with the number of service providers increasing from 227,000 in 2017 to 1.09 million in 2023, and the number of benefiting smallholder farmers increasing from 36.6 million to more than 94 million. However, current agricultural socialized service resources are mainly concentrated in grain production. For cash crops such as tea, the penetration rate of socialized services remains low, and industrial development faces three major challenges. First, adoption of socialized services is mostly concentrated in grain-producing areas, while adoption rates for cash crops such as tea are relatively low, and tea farmers’ willingness to actively adopt services is insufficient. Second, existing studies mostly focus on a single output (such as income or green technology application) and lack multidimensional integrated analysis of income, land, technology, and well-being. Third, the deep mechanisms by which socialized services improve tea farmers’ happiness have rarely been explored, and the traditional economic performance perspective cannot fully reflect tea farmers’ true happiness. Tea farmers face multiple constraints, including difficulties in operating steep-slope tea plantations, information asymmetry, and differences in household social capital, making it urgent to precisely identify the differentiated effects of different service stages (pre-production, during-production, and post-production).
The study achieved three key breakthroughs.

1. It revealed the core influencing factors of adopting socialized services: older household heads, good health status, sufficient agricultural labor, large production area, government technical training, green production demonstration zones, and cooperative participation significantly promoted adoption; while steep tea plantation slopes, more government penalties, and higher household social status inhibited adoption.
2. It precisely quantified the magnitude of multidimensional effects: adopting socialized services increased total income by 17.4%–18.9%, tea-specific income by 31.7%–32.2%, the number of green technologies adopted by 32.1%–32.9%, decreased tea garden land outflow area by 4.87%–6.26%, and increased subjective well-being by 26.3%–31.1%.
3. It clarified, for the first time, the transmission pathways of happiness: socialized services indirectly improved tea farmers’ subjective well-being through four mediating pathways: increasing total household income, increasing tea income, promoting green technologies, and increasing leisure time.

It is particularly noteworthy that post-production services (picking, trading, and logistics) had the most significant effect on improving tea farmers’ income and happiness, while pre-production services (technical training) had the largest effect on improving happiness (41.3%).
This study directly responds to the core concerns of China’s “rural revitalization” strategy and the building of an “agricultural powerhouse,” providing precise micro-level empirical evidence for how smallholder farmers can integrate into modern agriculture. The study found that socialized services effectively address the pain points of small tea farmers’ dispersed operations by replacing heavy manual labor and reducing transaction costs.
More importantly, the study breaks through the traditional limitation of focusing only on economic performance and confirms the significant positive effect of socialized services on enhancing tea farmers’ “subjective well-being,” aligning with the country’s transition from “high-speed growth” to “high-quality development” and the emphasis on people’s sense of gain and happiness in the “common prosperity” strategy. Based on this, the research team proposed differentiated support policies and pathways for promoting mechanization in hilly and mountainous tea plantations. This not only has strong practical relevance but also provides a scientific basis for optimizing the agricultural socialized service system in the future and achieving a win-win of industrial efficiency enhancement and farmers’ income growth.
DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2026670