Taking 202 samples of farmers from Longgang Village and Huoyuan Village in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province as an example, on the basis of constructing the scale of farmers' livelihood risk perception and the scale of participation willingness, structural equation modelling was used to analyze the data, and at the same time, basic individual characteristics of farmers were used as the moderating variables to classify the farmers into new and old farmers, and to carry out multi-cohort analyses. The results show that the perception of development risk, production risk and social risk together constitute the perception of livelihood risk of farmers, and all three significantly affect the willingness of farmers to participate, and there is a moderating effect of the basic characteristics of individual farmers on their willingness to participate. Based on this, policy recommendations are proposed to effectively promote sustainable livelihoods for farmers.