Abstract:With the rapid development of digital technology and the effective promotion of digital rural construction in China, agricultural services, aiming at empowering small farmers, have also shown a clear trend of informatization. Based on a micro survey data from 966 rice growers in Hubei province, this paper analyzed the improvement of agricultural service informationization on farmers’ production efficiency and explored the differential impact of informationization of agricultural services on farmers’ production efficiency after distinguishing service stages and service objects by the Tobit model and the extended regression model. Results indicate that the proportion of farmers obtaining agricultural information through information-based services was only 34.06%, which may be related to the weak information literacy caused by the aging of rural labor force. The average production efficiency of those farmers who had obtained relevant information was 0.845, which was 0.029 higher than those who had not obtained relevant information. The informationization of agricultural services had a positive promoting effect on improving farmers’ production efficiency, mainly by expanding information acquisition channels and improving production technology levels. The impact of agricultural service informationization in different stages on farmers’ production efficiency was in descending order of pre-production, mid-production, and post-production. In addition, the improvement effect of agricultural service informationization on the production efficiency of the “non-elite” groups was better than that of the “elite” groups. Therefore, to drive the improvement of small-scale farmers’ operational efficiency and to promote information fairness in rural areas, this paper suggests: strengthening the construction of informationization of agricultural services and attaching importance to the promotion of pre-production stage.