Research on micro-agricultural locations from perspective of farmers at village-level may help us to understand characteristics of agriculture location and its regional mechanism in the special circumstances of China.Drawing on data from remote sensing resolution and our surveys and interviews with the farmers on agricultural land use at Huangzhuang Village, Nanyang City, Henan Province, we found the agricultural belts surrounding the center of the village.In comparing to Tunnen’s agricultural model, the radius of belts was distributed in a very small scale.From the village outwards, the vegetable belt, cropping-vegetable mixed belt and food grain belt were classified.Over the belts, labor-intensity in farming production decreased gradually.Along with the increase of farming distance from the village, the ratio of vegetable land reduced, and accordingly the input as well as the income per acreage delined.Distance played an important role for farmers to decide agriculture locations.The results demonstrated the presence of Thunen belt in the small village of Central China, but the fundamental reasons behind were different from Thunen’s study.In stead of the physical distance and transport cost of goods from production place to the market, the key factor that determined the agricultural locations in this study was the production cost decided by labor-intensity in farming individual crops.Since vegetable production required large amount of labor force and village was the center of labor, the cost of communication from village to farmland should be much higher than the cost of vegetable transportation from farmland to market.This explained the concentration of vegetable production in the land close to village site.The case study is particularly important given the household responsible system that has been practiced since the early 1980s in rural China.It is the households, rather than the village, that decide types and area of crop production.If farmers have different farming behavior, or if the responsible arable land for a household is concentrates in certain areas, it would lead to different spatial patterns in agricultural land use.Accordingly, it should be cautious to use this result in other situations.
LI Xiao-Jian, GAO Geng-He
. Agricultural location at the village level in Central China—A case study for Huangzhuang village in Nanyang city, Henan Province[J]. SCIENTIA GEOGRAPHICA SINICA, 2008
, 28(5)
: 616
-623
.
DOI: 10.13249/j.cnki.sgs.2008.05.616
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