<p>As agricultural environmental pollution intensifies, stimulating the enthusiasm of agricultural green technology innovation entities (AGTIEs) to enhance innovation quality is crucial for driving the green transformation of agriculture. From the perspective of market incentives, this study first theoretically analyzes the impact of the scale of new agricultural business entities (SNABE) on the innovation enthusiasm of AGTIEs. Following this, a two-way fixed effects model, mediating effects model, and threshold effects model were constructed and empirically tested using data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2022. The results show that an expansion of the SNABE can promote the transformation of agricultural green technology (AGT) patents, activating market incentive mechanisms and significantly enhancing the innovation enthusiasm of AGTIEs. From the perspective of innovation strategies, influenced by market incentive mechanisms, all types of AGTIEs tend to adopt a quantity-oriented innovation strategy. Although this approach contributes to increased innovation output, it does not favor improvements in innovation quality. Under this mechanism's influence, different AGTIEs' innovation preferences exhibit significant divergence. "Individuals" and "enterprises" show a stronger preference for innovations related to pesticide alternatives and alternate irrigation technologies, whereas "research institutes" do not display a distinct preference. Finally, using the threshold effect model, a nonlinear relationship between the SNABE and the innovation enthusiasm of AGTIEs was captured. The impact on the innovation enthusiasm of "individuals" and "enterprises" shows a "U-shaped" pattern, while the impact on "research institutes" exhibits an "N-shaped" change pattern. Finally, based on these findings, we propose targeted recommendations, including expanding the SNABE.</p>