Abstract
Agricultural clusters play a powerful role in promoting the agricultural transformation and rejuvenation of rural areas. However, no in-depth exploration has been made on how agricultural clusters form and evolve, especially in the context of China’s long-term small-scale rural economy. The purpose of this article is to reveal the formation process and evolution mechanism of agricultural clusters by case study research. With the knowledge flow as the starting point, this article takes the Vegetable Cluster in Shouguang City of Shandong Province, China as an example to construct a theoretical framework in the three dimensions of points (spin-offs of enterprises or farmers), lines (network-spillovers of various innovation) and planes (the formation of new regional industry spaces) and put forward theoretical hypotheses. It is shown that: (1) The local spin-off of seed farmers is the main path in the transformation of traditional farmers into enterprises. (2) The network-spillover and adoption of innovative knowledge promote the derivation of specialized farmers or enterprises and realize regional agricultural specialization and spatial agglomeration. (3) The formation of the agricultural cluster resulted from the joint effects of spin-off derived from the entrepreneurial spirit of the farmers, network-spillover of various agricultural innovations and spatial integration of the agricultural landscape. The formation of local agricultural innovation systems marks the maturity of an agricultural cluster. This article contribute to the field by studying one source of Alfred Marshall’s knowledge of external economy from the perspective of spin-offs and innovative spillovers, analyzing the agricultural increasing returns to scale neglected by Krugman, and exploring the micro mechanism of farmers’ enterprise-oriented evolution and the formation of agricultural clusters in underdeveloped rural areas. The research results are of profound referential significance for the cultivation of agricultural clusters in developing countries.
Highlights
Cluster initiatives are starting to be seen as a key approach to help advance all sectors of many countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
How are agricultural clusters formed? How have they evolved? During our survey, we found that traditional farmers in China’s small-scale farmers’ economy have evolved into enterprise-type farmers or agricultural enterprises by accepting and adopting new knowledge
The network-spillover and adoption of innovative knowledge promote the derivation of specialized farmers or enterprises and realize regional agricultural specialization and spatial agglomeration
Summary
Cluster initiatives are starting to be seen as a key approach to help advance all sectors of many countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. As global agriculture has continuously demonstrated a clustering trend, agricultural clusters have increasingly attracted the attention of the academic world and have become a strategic tool for many developing countries to increase their agricultural international competitiveness [2,8]. In recent years, such bottlenecks as land, capital, and technology in China’s agricultural development have become increasingly prominent. In the economic development of China’s rural areas, the emergence of specialized villages and agricultural clusters plays an important role [9], especially in recent years, and the country’s policies on such issues as moderate scale management (1997), land circulation (2004), cultivation of new business entities (2014) and separation of the three rights (2016). The integration of small-scale farmers achieves the connection between small-scale production and large markets, promoting the transformation of China’s agricultural and agricultural development modes
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