Abstract
The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of land fertility on the land size distribution of rice-growing farms in Hokkaido. By the use of land sale data from 1965 to 1982 at Nanporo-cho, which is well known for large-scale rice-growing farms, the author verified the inverse correlation between land fertility and the land size of farm households.
According to the analysis of these data, the following properties were clarified about the dynamic process of farm size variation. First, the divergent point of peasant differentiation, beyond which expanding farms are superior to contracting farms, is smaller for farms with high-fertility land than for farms with low-fertility land. Furthermore, the divergent point approximately agrees with the minimum land size for the economic viability of a family farm. Second, for the first half of the observation period, another divergent point is recognized, beyond which contracting farms become dominant again. This phenomenon can be reasonably explained by the increasing average cost in large-scale farms which are operated with a considerable amount of hired labor. In addition, it should be noted that the effect of this increasing cost is more severe on farms located at lower fertility areas. Finally, there exists a structural distortion in land market caused by the difference in land fertility. That is, the market becomes a seller's market for the land of high-fertility while there remains an excess supply in the market for low-fertility land. And it is the purchase of low-fertility land by a high-fertility farm that dissolves these disequilibria, which in turn has the effect of producing an inverse correlation between land fertility and farm size mentioned above.
