Agricultural carbon footprint, energy utilization and economic quality: What causes what, and where?

China, being a significant agricultural country and the world's greatest carbon emitter, is today faced with the combined problems of improving agricultural economic quality and reducing carbon emissions, all while dealing with resource constraints. Exploring the nexus and internal mechanism between agricultural carbon footprint (CF), energy utilization and economic quality thereby implies practical significance. For these reasons, the current study intends to explore the nexus and internal mechanism between agricultural CF, energy utilization, and economic qualities of main grain-planting provinces in China. Multi-approaches like, Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, the Granger Causality Test based on the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), and Impulse Response and Variance Decomposition (IRVD) methods, and a time-series data in the duration from 1997 to 2019 are employed. The findings indicate that: 1) Agricultural CF, energy utilization and economic quality demonstrate an increasing trend; 2) There exists environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in agricultural CF in China's main grain-planting provinces; 3) Energy utilization negatively influenced agricultural CF in both the short-term and long-term; 4) In the short-term and long-term, a bidirectional causality exist among agricultural CF and economic quality, as well as a unidirectional causality from energy utilization to agricultural CF and economic quality.