Abstract: Helping the farmers to participate in the characteristic agricultural project is the main way of poverty alleviation precise. Based on the micro survey data of farmers in Wuling mountainous area, this paper uses the PSM method to empirically analyze the difference of poverty reducing effects of farmers participate in characteristic agricultural project. The results show that poor farmers' participation level is far lower than the non-poor famers, and the participation behavior has obvious ability dependence characteristics, leading to low ability of the poor farmers' insufficient participation. Farmer participate in characteristic agricultural project has a significant poverty reduction effect, and the probability of poverty occurrence of farmers is 10.11% lower than that of farmers who do not participate in the characteristic agricultural project. Based on the further study of farmers with different participation ability, it is found that the poverty reduction effect of farmers has obvious "weak" characteristics, and there are some "threshold" constraints for low level farmers.

Key words: participation ability, characteristic agriculture, poverty reduction effect, entropy method, PSM