Abstract: Returning rural migrants are a vital force to solve the problem of “who will produce grains in China” and to improve the organizational degree of China’s agriculture. The government is also vigorously publicizing and guiding migrant workers to return to their hometowns to engage in agriculture and to lead new agricultural cooperatives. Based on a large sample of national professional grain farmers in 2017 and applying the theory of new migration economics, this paper examined the impacts of non-farm work experience of rural migrants on their returning and becoming leaders of agricultural cooperatives by the binary models, the double robust modes, the multi-ordered models, the matching models, and other econometric models. Descriptive analysis shows that among all professional grain farmers, return migrants account for 23.66%, and leaders of agricultural cooperatives account for 24.59%. Among those returning migrant workers, 34.65% of those with non-farm work experiences serve as the leaders of agricultural cooperatives, while only 21.47% of those without non-farm work experiences serve as the leaders of agricultural cooperatives. Empirical estimation results show that compared with farmers without non-farming employment experiences, the probability of those with non-farming employment experiences being leaders of agricultural cooperatives is significantly higher by 6%. Returning migrant workers are nearly 1/4 more likely to be leaders of agricultural cooperative than their counterparts. The paper finds evidence of positive effect of non-farming work experience on being leaders of agricultural cooperatives. The mechanism analysis shows the improvement in human capital, agricultural production input, and government policy support are keys to incentivize returning migrant workers to become leaders of agricultural cooperatives. The government should encourage young farmers with low levels of human capital to go out for non-farming employment and accumulate personal capital through non-farm employment. The government should also attract and help returning migrant workers to better engage in agriculture and rural vitalization by playing their leading roles.