Abstract: Water and soil erosion affects agricultural production and farmers’ life directly. The adoption of water and soil conservation technology (WSCT）can help to improve agricultural productivity and promote the sustainable agricultural development. Policy incentives may affect farmers’ decision-making on adopting WSCT. This paper conducts a study based on the micro-survey data of 622 farmer households in Shaanxi Province, the findings show that the policy incentives can significantly promote farmer households to adopt the WSCT. This promotion effect is achieved by increasing the awareness of farmers about the ecological and economic benefits of the soil and water conservation technology. Further research has found that different policy incentives (technology training, technology subsidies, technology demonstrations) can all significantly promote the adoption of WSCT by farmers, and policy incentives have a significant promoting effect on the adoption of WSCT with different attributes by farmers. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that policy incentives have a more significant promoting effect on the adoption of WSCT by farmers, particularly among those with high levels of specialization, education, large-scale operations, and high levels of disaster. The government should increase publicity, enrich the forms of technology promotion, improve the subsidy systems, and adopt different policy incentives for different attributes, so as to guide and promote farmers to adopt WSCT.

Key words: policy incentives, water and soil conservation technology, technical cognition, sustainable agriculture