Objective/Meaning Aiming at the practical problem that there is a significant deviation between the willingness and actual behavior of fruit farmers to apply organic fertilizer, this paper aims to reveal its influencing factors and its internal hierarchical structure, in order to provide decision-making reference for promoting the transformation of willingness to behavior and promoting the green and sustainable development of agriculture.

Methods/Procedures Based on the field survey of 1124 apple growers in Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and Shandong provinces in the Yellow River Basin, the binary Logistic-ISM model was used to analyze the influencing factors of the deviation between the willingness of fruit farmers to apply organic fertilizer and their behavior, and identify the key influencing factors, and then analyze their correlation paths and hierarchical structures.

Results/Conclusions The results showed that: (1) The ten factors including government effect, technology cognition, policy satisfaction, policy perception, policy subsidy, income expectation, yield expectation, economic expectation, education level and per capita income had significant impact on the deviation between the willingness and behavior of fruit farmers to apply the organic fertilizer. (2) The influencing factors showed a multi-level structure: technical cognition, policy perception and economic expectation were the surface direct factors; government effect, policy satisfaction, income expectation, output expectation and per capita monthly income were the middle indirect factors; and policy subsidy and education level were the deep root factors. (3) The fruit farmers in the Yellow River Basin had certain understanding of organic fertilizer, but showed a low application behavior on the whole. Therefore, the countermeasures were put forward including increasing the publicity and the online and offline knowledge popularization training to improve the cognition of fruit farmers on the organic fertilizer, strengthening the policy support to encourage the fruit farmers to actively apply the organic fertilizer, and formulating the differentiated policies for the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to improve the the income and cognitive level of fruit farmers, so as to promote the transformation of their willingness to apply the organic fertilizer into actual behavior.