Suitable farming radius and its influencing factors in rural residential areas in Heilongjiang Province

Abstract: Cultivating radius refers to the agricultural production service radius of rural residential areas. Determining suitable cultivation radius can not only save agricultural labor time, improve production efficiency, but also provide basis for reasonably determining the distance and the area of settlement to realize the efficient and intensive utilization of land. Thus, this paper selected the 859 Farm in reclamation area of Heilongjiang Province as the study area, applied the method of descriptive statistics, and explored the suitable cultivation radius and main influencing factors of rural settlements in reclamation area of Heilongjiang Province. Then ArcGIS software was used to extract populated residential areas of each administrative district in the year of 2010 and the center of mass of the cultivated land, and the point distance analysis was used to determine the space distance between populated residential areas of each administrative district and the farthest field (i.e. the radius of farming for each administrative zone). Secondly, the distances between the scattered settlements and settlement communities in the management areas were extracted. At the same time, SPSS 18.0 software was used to generate the various administrative scattering settlements and the frequency distribution histogram of settlement spatial distance and the probability of normal curve, and with the average of the probability density curve (the distance from the vertex) the suitable cultivation radius of each management area was determined. The method of kernel density was used for analysis of the center of mass of scattered settlements in the farm. The density distribution of the cultivated land in the farm and the spatial distance of scattered settlements were superposed and analyzed to determine whether there was any influence on the suitable cultivation radius. Finally, the suitable cultivated radius was used as dependent variable, the ratio of paddy field, land area and deviation distance were used as independent variables, and multivariate linear regression analysis was carried out to determine the correlation between the 4 factors. The results show that the average value of suitable cultivation radius of each management area in the study area was 5 055 m, and the maximum value and the minimum value of the cultivation radius were 7 438 and 3 265 m respectively. The average cultivation radius corresponded to the 20 min travel time for agricultural machine and 10 min for the motorcycle. In the significance test, F value of the suitable cultivation radius and paddy field ratio, land area, deviation distance between gathered settlement and corresponding company's geometric center was much larger than F0.01 value. The 3 factors had significant influence on the suitable cultivation radius. That was to say, the suitable cultivation radius in the area with higher proportion of paddy fields was relatively small, the suitable cultivation radius in the bigger land area was relatively big, and the suitable cultivation radius in the area with larger deviation distance was relatively small. The study shows that the occupation of cultivated land by scattered settlements is serious in the 859 Farm; the cultivated land structure, the land area, the deviation distance between gathered settlement and corresponding company's geometric center are the main factors to influence the farming radius.