The current development scale of agricultural productive services in China remains unsatisfactory and is further hindered by significant structural imbalances. Agricultural insurance serves as a vital risk-dispersion mechanism for farming operations. After purchasing agricultural insurance to obtain yield or income security, farmers can reduce the costs of service quality supervision, and agricultural insurance can encourage the adoption and experimentation with new agricultural production technologies and services.

This paper first constructs a theoretical model to numerically simulate how agricultural insurance incentivizes crop farmers’ adoption of agricultural productive services, and then empirically tests the posited relationships using microdata from the 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS). The findings reveal that: (1) Agricultural insurance can significantly promote the adoption of agricultural productive services by crop farmers, with a stronger effect observed in technology-intensive segments compared to labor-intensive ones. (2) Natural disaster risk and the degree of land fragmentation play a positive moderating role in the relationship between agricultural insurance and the adoption of agricultural productive services, with a more pronounced effect in labor-intensive stages. (3) The primary mechanism through which agricultural insurance increases the adoption of agricultural productive services is the expansion of planting scale, rather than encouraging off-farm employment.

The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) It constructs a two-stage and two-state OLG partial equilibrium model to numerically simulate how agricultural insurance coverage levels and disaster occurrence probabilities affect farmers’ adoption of agricultural productive services. (2) It empirically examines how agricultural insurance promotes the adoption of agricultural productive services, paying particular attention to the heterogeneous effect across both labor-intensive and technology-intensive service types, as well as across five key stages: land preparation, sowing, pesticide application, fertilization, and harvest-transport operations. (3) It empirically investigates how disaster risk and land fragmentation moderate the relationship between agricultural insurance and the adoption of agricultural productive services. (4) It further analyzes the transmission mechanism through which agricultural insurance affects the adoption of agricultural productive services.