With the deepening of industrialization and urbanization in China, the agricultural labor force loses and the capital-labor substitution in agricultural production accelerates, but farmers still suffer from capital insufficiency. Apart from income or savings, another important source of farmers’ capital acquisition comes from the rural credit market. However, the credit availability for farmers has always been at a low level, along with the phenomenon of Credit Exclusion, one of whose explanations is that the limited level of social security, especially medical security, makes it inadequate for farmers to cope with health risks such as illness or work-related injuries leading to a higher risk of credit default.

In theory, social security can help farmers cope with family risks, improve their credit qualifications, increase their credit access, and then affect agricultural production. At present, there is little literature discussing the impact of social security on credit availability and agricultural production. Therefore, this paper, taking the New Rural Cooperative Medical System （NRCMS） as an example, using the data of China Family Panel Studies （CFPS） in 2010, explores how the NRCMS changes agricultural production through credit availability from the perspectives of labor productivity and land productivity.

The results show that the NRCMS significantly improves the credit availability for farmers and labor productivity, but has no obvious impact on land productivity. This indicates that social security can increase the credit access to capital substitution, and maintain the current agricultural productivity not to decline or even increase. Furthermore, compared with increasing grain production, the NRCMS is more likely to help farmers increase income. This paper clarifies the specific mechanism of social security serving credit availability and agricultural production, and provides a new perspective for rural revitalization.