Reciprocal and Symbiotic: Family Farms’ Operational Performance and Long-Term Cooperation of Entities in the Agricultural Industrial Chain—From the Evidence of Xinjiang in China

The family farm is an important entity in the modern agricultural industrial chain. It is of great significance to empirically study its operational performance improvement and sustainable development. This paper introduces symbiosis theory to establish a symbiosis system framework of the family farm industrial chain and analyzes family farms’ operational performance from the view of industrial symbiosis cooperation. We selected 552 agricultural planting family farms in China’s Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps as samples to measure the operational environment and performance of family farms using factor analysis and examining the effects of long-term cooperation among the industrial chain entities on family farms’ operational performance using the ordered probit model. The results show that the long-term cooperation of the family farms with other entities has a significant positive impact on the family farms’ operational performance, which can be enhanced by the improvement of cooperation and moderated by the external environment. Therefore, it is suggested to promote the long-term cooperation between family farms and other industrial chain entities, as well as the industrial environment optimization, to accelerate the healthy and sustainable development of family farms with a continuous, symmetrical, and reciprocal symbiotic model.