Abstract: It is of great significance to guide farmers to adopt conservation tillage technology for increasing yield, creating efficiency of farmland, and promoting sustainable agricultural development. Based on a field survey data of 439 farmers in Henan, Heilongjiang, Shandong, and Shanxi provinces, this paper analyzed the influences of subject cognition and situational constraint on farmers' adoption intensity of conservation tillage technology by the ordered Probit model and the moderation model and examined the moderating effect of the situational constraint as a regulating variable. Results show that: 1) The adoption intensity of conservation tillage technology by farmers was generally low, and the proportion of farmers gradually decreased with the increase of technology adoption; 2) Both subject cognition and situational constraint significantly promoted the adoption of conservation tillage techniques by farmers, and this conclusion passed the robustness test; and 3) Environmental pressure reinforced the influence of ecological cognition on the intensity of conservation tillage technology adoption and policy support had a positive moderation effect of technology cognition on the adoption intensity of conservation tillage technologies by farmers, but weakened the effect of ecological cognition on the adoption intensity of conservation tillage technologies. Based on the above results, this paper suggests to pay more attention to the improvement of farmers' main cognitive ability, to enhance the awareness of agro-ecological environment protection, to make farmers' cognition "internalized in the mind" as well as technology adoption "externalized in the practice", to strengthen policy guidance and financial subsidies, and to improve farmers' policy satisfaction and policy effect.