Abstract: Digital agriculture innovation serves as both the core engine for developing new quality productive forces in agriculture and a crucial support for accelerating the construction of an agricultural powerhouse. Based on city-level panel data from 2017 to 2023 and the incoPat global patent database, this paper takes the establishment of national agricultural high-tech industry demonstration zones as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a staggered difference-in-differences model to systematically analyze the impact and mechanisms of the policy on digital agriculture innovation. The findings are as follows. First, the construction of agricultural high-tech industry demonstration zones significantly enhances regional digital agriculture innovation, with certain diffusion effects in agriculture-, forestry-, animal husbandry-, and fishery-related fields; this conclusion holds after excluding concurrent policy interference and pandemic effects. Second, the policy promotes digital agriculture innovation through two synergistic pathways: resource compensation, which alleviates financing constraints and attracts talent, and scenario empowerment, which transforms resource inputs into innovation outcomes through application scenarios. Third, the innovation effect is more pronounced in non-eastern regions, non-plain regions, water-abundant regions, and cities with higher agricultural mechanization and greater digital industry agglomeration. Accordingly, differentiated digital transformation pathways should be adopted based on regional resource endowments and industrial conditions, the coordination between resource compensation and scenario empowerment should be strengthened, and mechanisms for accumulating and converting agricultural data into a production factor should be improved to provide institutional support for the sustained development of new quality productive forces in agriculture.