["Journal of Agrarian Change, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nSmallholders are commonly viewed as key supporters of ecological agriculture. Paradoxically, in a tea‐producing county in Southeast China, local policies aimed at promoting ecological practices failed to engage smallholders and instead ended up favouring large producers. Using Anxi County's pesticide crisis as a case study, this paper analyses barriers to smallholder participation in ecological transitions through a scale framework examining three interrelated sectors: smallholders, agroecosystems, and governance systems. First, smallholder practices are constrained by cross‐scale interactions including market forces, landholding patterns and urbanization. Second, scale mismatches between ecological processes and land institutions undermine collective management of shared ecological resources. Third, governing China's multiscale agricultural production system, with its vast number of diverse producers, poses significant challenges in balancing competing interests across different scales. Anxi's case highlights the difficulties of advancing ecological transitions in a smallholder‐dominated context.\n"]