Abstract:Water shortage has become a bottleneck restricting the development of agriculture, developing the water-saving irrigation is an important way to solve the shortage of agricultural water resources. Taking the farmers in Zhangye area of Gansu Province as an example, Using Probit regression model to analysis the learning ability and external risk on farmers" water-saving irrigation technology ,and test the mitigation of learning ability on external risk by introducing interaction terms.The results showed that the basic learning ability, the knowledge interaction ability and the identification ability had a significant positive effect on the farmers" water-saving irrigation technology, while the external risk had a negative effect on the water-saving irrigation technology. At the same time, learning ability can mitigate the impact of external risk. In addition to the above factors, farmers" use of water-saving irrigation technology was also affected by gender, age, health and the number of households.