How Much Did Internet Use Promote Grain Production?—Evidence from a Survey of 1242 Farmers in 13 Provinces in China

Increasing grain production and ensuring food security are always major issues in China, which are related to the sustainable development of the nation. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 has brought new challenges to global food security, which highlights the “ballast stone” and “stabilizer” role of food. China’s food security must rely on domestic production. As an important production factor, the Internet is also an important channel for farmers to obtain agricultural information, which can effectively reduce the information search cost and information asymmetry. Existing studies have mainly focused on the impact of Internet use on agricultural inputs, agricultural prices, and agricultural efficiency; there are few studies on the impact of Internet use on grain production. To fill this gap, based on the micro survey data of 1242 maize farmers in 13 provinces in China, this paper employs linear regression models and PSM methods to deeply explore the impact of Internet use on farmers’ grain production. The results show that Internet use has a significant positive impact on the grain production of farmers. Compared with the farmers who do not use the Internet, Internet use increases the maize yield of farmers by 14.25%. The heterogeneity analysis further shows that the impact of Internet use on the grain production of different farmers varies significantly: the maize yield per ha after using the Internet for farmers of younger, low education level, large-scale, and living in well-developed villages had increased by 13.65%, 15.38%, 23.94%, and 10.64%, respectively, compared with the counterfactual scenario of farmers who do not use the Internet. The results of this paper have passed the robustness test.