Management and spatial evolution of rural land circulation: Taking Zhengjia Town as an example

The scale operation in various forms of rural land circulation in China is the way for the development of modern agriculture, and is also the basic direction of agricultural reform. The right to rural land contractual management registration makes the position of cadastral land and its interrelated information, as contractor and area, clear by Geographic Information Systems (GIS). That supplied a data base for land circulation spatial management. In this paper, we discussed the correlation between the management and the spatial position of transferred rural land, in order to support the policy and decision for agriculture. Taking Zhengjia Town as an example, which located in the west of Dongchangfu District, Liaocheng, Shandong, we made a survey and got the information about the land circulation, the operators who engaged in the transferred land, and the farmers who had transferred their farmlands from 2011 to 2015. Based on the outcome data of right to rural land contractual management registration, the circulation parcels and the cadastral parcels were linked by their only parcel code, and then formed the land circulation spatial information. Using ArcGIS 10.1 for spatial analysis and correlation analysis, we analyzed the correlation between the management and the spatial evolution of the transferred land on some indicators including acquirement intention, operation style, land use, circulation variability, distribution of circulation management right, and compared the income of the operators and the farmers. According to the survey, the scope of the transferred land was gradually increased. The area was 16.09ha in 2011 and 147.27ha in 2015, 19.22% of the contracted land. The results show that the main form of land circulation was to rent, and scale operation in northern and fragmented operation in southern. The transferred lands which were acquired by family contract have the largest area. However, in the south, the farmers seemed like to transfer their lands which were acquired by bidding. The operators aged in 40-49 managed the most transferred land, accounting for 77.00% of the total circulation area. Followed by 39 years old under, and the over 50 years old was the least. Before transferred, all farmland was used to grow grain. But 93% farmlands were changed the crops after land circulation. As the investment of time, capital, farmland and implied labor increased, there was a certain increase in income of the operators and the farmers, however, and a few operators had no profit because of the business model. There was no spatial correlation between the farmlands position and the farmers' income at the fragmented operation region. The results can provide an idea for spatial information management of land circulation based on GIS, and defend the farmers' contractual rights when the boundaries are destroyed. With the spatial informatization of farmland and the improvement of data quality and quantity, big data will further predict land circulation spatial arrangement and business model.