Abstract: Based on the micro survey data of 1032 farmer households in China’s 10 provinces, this paper systematically analyzes the influence and its mechanism of high-standard farmland construction on the “grain-oriented” or “non-grain-oriented” agricultural planting structure. It is found that the implementation of high-standard farmland construction policy and the increase of construction scale both have a “grain-oriented” impact on agricultural planting structure, and it is still significant under a series of robustness tests of replacing the explained variables, the continuous DID estimation of provincial macro data and the propensity score matching method. The mechanism analysis shows that the high-standard farmland construction encourages farmers to grow grain crops by improving the level of agricultural socialization service. And the farmers’ behavior response is characterized by “grain-oriented” characteristics. The heterogeneity analysis shows that compared with the non-major grain producing areas and the mountainous areas, the high-standard farmland construction can increase the proportion of grain sown area in the major grain producing areas and the plain and hilly areas, and has a more obvious impact on the “grain-oriented” large-scale farmer households than the small farmer households. Therefore, we should promote the high-standard farmland construction according to the actual needs, improve the effectiveness of high-standard farmland construction, at the same time, expand the agricultural socialization service functions and encourage farmers to orderly carry out large-scale planting, thus promoting the “grain-oriented” agricultural planting structure.

Key words: high-standard farmland construction, agricultural planting structure, grain-oriented, agricultural socialization service