Abstract: Agricultural ecological efficiency is an important indicator of sustainable agricultural development. Major grain-producing areas are an important support for guaranteeing food security. Promoting the improvement of agricultural ecological efficiency in major food-producing areas is one of the important ways to achieve sustainable agricultural development. This paper measured the temporal evolution of agricultural ecological efficiency in China's major grain-producing regions from 2012~2021 by using the super-efficient SBM model, taking into account the non-desired outputs from the perspective of the three major river basins. The Theil index was used to reveal the spatial differentiation characteristics of agricultural ecological efficiency in the main grain producing areas. On this basis, the dominant influencing factors and their interactions affecting the spatial-temporal evolution of agricultural ecological efficiency were identified, with the help of geographical detector model. The results showed: (1) The agricultural ecological efficiency in the main grain producing areas showed a fluctuating upward trend, with an average annual growth rate of 1.05%, however, it did not reach an effective state during the study period. The three major basins showed an imbalance state, with obvious hierarchical features: Songhua River Basin > Yangtze River Basin > Yellow River Basin; (2) The spatial differentiation of agricultural ecological efficiency was significant, but the overall difference was at a decreasing trend. The spatial differences among the three major river basins mainly originated from within the region, among which the Yangtze River Basin had the largest difference and contribution rate, followed by the Yellow River Basin and the Songhua River Basin. (3)The dominant drivers of agricultural ecological efficiency were  urbanization rate, farmers' income level, precipitation. The influence of dominant driving factors on agricultural ecological efficiency showed a feature of territoriality and difference. The spatial and temporal evolution of agricultural ecological efficiency was driven by the multi-dimensional comprehensive effects of social and economic development, agricultural resource endowment and natural ecological environment. The interactive detection was mainly based on nonlinear enhancement, supplemented by double enhancement. Finally, based on the research outcome, the countermeasures to further improve the agricultural ecological efficiency of the three major basins were proposed.