Improving the quality of domestic agricultural machinery is crucial for China's agricultural machinery manufacturing to become stronger. This study summarizes the status quo and existing problems of agricultural machinery manufacturing in China and focuses on empirical study. Based on the data collected from farmer surveys in Central China, farmers' subjective evaluation on the quality of domestic agricultural machinery is investigated from the aspects of hardware quality, applicability and operation convenience, as well as operation effect of the machinery. The results suggest that farmers' satisfaction with steel quality, engine quality, fuel consumption, and failure frequency of domestic large- and medium-sized agricultural machinery is significantly lower than that of non-domestic agricultural machinery. Less than half of these farmers are satisfied with the machine–land matching degree, machine–driver matching degree, and shading and rainproof effect of both domestic and non-domestic machinery. Moreover, their satisfaction with the operating speed, operating coverage, and factor (i.e., water, fertilizer, pesticide, and seed) saving effect of domestic agricultural machinery is low. To this end, countermeasures are proposed to improve the quality of domestic agricultural machinery, including building a national team to overcome technical difficulties in key components, establishing a long-term and enterprisecentered innovation system, optimizing the research and development of intellectualized and eco-friendly agricultural machinery, and reconstructing the discipline system for agricultural machinery in universities.