Keep the smart in the farm: understanding farmers’ post-adoption behavior toward IoT in agriculture

Purpose Digital transformation in agriculture hinges less on initial adoption than on whether farmers continue to use smart technologies once novelty, incentives, or external pressures fade. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this study examines how six experiential and contextual stimuli shape farmers’ Overall Perceived Value (OPV) of IoT technologies, and how OPV, in turn, drives their continuance intention to use (CIU). Design/methodology/approach Survey data from 410 Chinese farmers were analyzed using an integrated analytical approach, including PLS-SEM, Importance–Performance Map Analysis (IPMA), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to test hypothesized relationships, identify managerial priorities, and capture non-linear predictive patterns. Findings PLS-SEM shows that the six stimuli collectively explained 73.7% of the variance in OPV, with perceived enjoyment and facilitating conditions emerging as the strongest drivers. OPV, in turn, strongly predicted CIU, with monetary value being the key contributor. Conversely, ANN revealed that conditional value emerged as the most influential predictor of CIU, suggesting it may function as a threshold-like enabling condition whose weakness could reduce the benefits of other value dimensions. Originality/value This is among the first studies to model OPV as a higher-order formative construct explaining IoT continuance intention in agriculture, integrating linear and non-linear analytics to reveal threshold dynamics that conventional models may overlook.