It is important to study rural transformation and development from the perspective of farmers' livelihood regime changes on the Loess Plateau. We selected cunties of Binxian, Changwu and Xunyi located in the apple growing area of the Loess Plateau, as a case study to construct the evolutionary path of rural regime, identify the micro factors that affect rural transformation and development, and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between farmers' household regime and rural transformation. In doing so we adopted a regime change perspective, and applied the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method, geodetector, and multiple linear regression. We obtained the following three findings. First, 27 of 130 selected samples, distributed mainly in areas with loess girder topography, belonged to the traditional agricultural regime. Meanwhile, 96 samples, distributed mainly in areas with loess tableland topography, belonged to the new agricultural regime. Another 7 samples, mainly distributed in valley areas, belonged to the non-agricultural regime. Second, when rural transformation sees the traditional agricultural regime replaced by the new agricultural regime, and finally the non-agricultural regime, the overall performance of rural development follows an inverted U-type development trend in a 3D space coordinate system. Simultaneously, rural population development follows an upward convex development trend in a 2D space coordinate system. Meanwhile, rural economic development follows an upward concave development trend, and agricultural production development follows an inverted U-type development trend, both in 2D space coordinate systems. Third, means of livelihood is the control variable that connects family system transformation and rural transformation development, which are determined by human and natural capital and directly affect financial and material capital at the farmer level. These aspects of transformation development are guided by the response process at the village level of three dimensions, namely population, economy and agriculture, and lead the process of rural transformation and development.