Decoding the mechanisms of agricultural multifunctionality: creative agriculture driving new quality productive forces through threshold effects and spatial spillovers

Introduction Creative agriculture, integrating cultural roots, knowledge networks, technological integration, and ecological embeddedness, represents a key pathway for developing new quality productive forces. Methods Using panel data from the Zhejiang University-Carter Institute China Agriculture Research Database, this study examines the effects of creative agriculture on new quality productive forces through direct effect, threshold, and spatial spillover analyses. Results The results reveal three key findings. First, creative agriculture significantly promotes the development of new quality productive forces, with technological progress and cultural empowerment showing particularly pronounced impacts, and this conclusion remains robust after endogeneity controls and robustness tests. Second, the effect exhibits nonlinear threshold characteristics: technology penetration shows diminishing marginal returns, whereas industrial integration and market incentives demonstrate stepwise empowerment effects. Third, creative agriculture generates significant positive spatial spillover effects, facilitating synergistic improvements in neighboring regions through knowledge diffusion and factor linkage. Heterogeneity analysis indicates stronger promotional effects in regions with higher baseline levels of new quality productive forces, eastern regions, and practices targeting new quality labor objects. Discussion These findings highlight that creative agriculture unlocks agricultural multifunctionality as a driver of new quality productive forces, thereby providing theoretical and empirical support for fostering sustainable agricultural development, and cultivating new quality productive forces through innovation-driven pathways.