Abstract: Family farm is an effective way of rural revitalization, and the influential factors of its performance have received widespread attention. Based on the resource dependence theory and a survey data of planting family farms in the three cities in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper analyzed the impacts of the operating environment on the performance of family farms by a structural equation model. Results show that: The operating environment has overall significant and specific effects on the performance of family farms. Among them, infrastructure construction environment and marketing management environment have the most significant effect on the survival performance of family farms, vocational education environment has the most significant effect on the growth performance of family farms, vocational education environment has the most significant effect on the innovation performance of family farms. This study shows that "to promote survival by improving markets and building facilities" and "to stimulate growth and innovation by strengthening vocational training" are more efficient development paths for family farms. Therefore, the optimization mechanism of operating environment of family farms should follow the principle of efficiency optimization, that is, allocating more policy resources to a more favorable operating environment, and then promoting the multi-level performance of family farms more effectively.