Abstract: Achieving high-quality agriculture is an inevitable requirement to effectively solve the major social contradictions in the new era. The digital economy provides a new impetus for achieving the high-quality agricultural development. By constructing a comprehensive index system of high-quality agricultural development from the three dimensions of innovative development, structural upgrading and collaborative sharing, this paper makes an in-depth analysis of the theoretical logic of digital economy enabling high-quality agricultural development.It also conducts an empirical test on the role of digital economy in enabling the high-quality agricultural development based on the panel data of China's 30 provinces from 2011 to 2020. The findings show that: (1) the development of digital economy is positively improving the high-quality agricultural development, but the impacts on different dimensional indexes have significant differences.Digital economy plays a significant role in the promotion at the structural upgrading dimension and at the collaborative sharingdimension, but the promotion at the innovational development dimension is relatively weaker; (2) from the perspective of regional heterogeneity, the promotion effect of digital economy on high-quality agricultural development is greater in the eastern region, followed by the western region, and smaller in the central region; (3) the promotion effect of digital economy on high-quality agricultural development has a certain threshold value, when the development level of digital economy is lower than the threshold value, its promotion effect on the high-quality agricultural development is smaller, whereas exceeding the threshold value, its promotion effect on the high-quality agricultural development will be greatly improved.

Key words: digital economy, agricultural high quality development, theoretical logic, mechanism of action