**3. Results and Discussion**

#### *3.1. Farmers' Characteristics and Remediation Intention*

With the development of existing soil remediation projects and a better understanding of the two remediation technologies, farmers' intentions for soil remediation have changed, and phytoremediation has become a popular remediation mode. Farmers with farmland transferred for soil remediation were defined as those participating in remediation. Among the 553 sample farmers, 22.6% did not participate in remediation, 54.1% participated in phytoremediation, 13.9% participated in passivation, and 9.4% participated in both remediation modes. Regarding future soil remediation intentions, 4.7% of the sample farmers believed that the soil did not need remediation, 82.8% expressed a preference for phytoremediation, and 12.5% preferred passivation (Figure 4a).

**Figure 4.** Farmers' characteristics and remediation intention. Future intentions of farmers with different (**a**) current participation, (**b**) gender, (**c**) agricultural labor, (**d**) farmland, (**e**) farm income, (**f**) project income for soil remediation.

Among the objective indicators of the sample farmers' characteristics (Supplementary Table S2), there were significant differences (*p* < 0.05) in soil remediation intentions among different levels of the population in terms of gender, agricultural labor, farmland, farm income, and project income.

• Women had a greater willingness to remediate than men (Figure 4b). Studies often show that women in agriculture are more environmentally conscious than men [38], which may be related to the fact that women are generally more risk-averse than men [25,39,40];


Agricultural research has observed relationships between farmers' environmental behavior and various demographic characteristics, such as age, education, and gender, which may be associated with decisions to participate in agri-environmental programs [38]. Many studies have shown that farmer's age and education level are key factors influencing their environmental behaviors [27]. Younger farmers are more likely to engage in adaptive production behaviors or environmental improvements than older farmers [27,44], and farmers with higher education levels are more likely to engage in health-related adaptive behaviors [19]. In contrast, farmers' willingness to remediate soil in this study was not significantly related to their age or education level. This may be explained by the high attrition of young labor in our study area (only 3.1% under the age of 40) and the generally low educational attainment of the remaining middle-aged and older labor force (only 8.5% high school and above), a common phenomenon in rural China, resulting in an under-representation of younger and better-educated farmers in the samples.
