A new framework for delineating farmland consolidation priority areas for promoting agricultural mechanization in hilly and mountainous areas

Delineating priority areas for farmland consolidation is an important way to realize the optimal allocation of limited resources and ensure maximum utility. Traditional approaches lack consideration of the applicability of agricultural machinery, which is extremely critical for improving agricultural mechanization levels in hilly and mountainous areas. To fill the gap, this study assesses the potential of farmland consolidation suitable for mechanization (PFCSM) at the parcel level, and combines it with the ant colony optimization (ACO) model to construct a framework for the delineation of priority areas. This was applied to Fengkai, a typical hilly county in China, and the results showed that farmland in priority areas lacks directly accessible roads for agricultural machinery and has an irregular shape; however, it has better natural conditions and shows spatial characteristics of local aggregation, and the framework can reasonably delineate farmland consolidation priority areas under various constraints and hypothetical scenarios, and effectively prevent zoning fragmentation. The marginal contributions of this study are mainly twofold: (1) constructing a potential assessment index system of farmland consolidation suitable for mechanization, which consists of road accessibility (RA), height difference (HD), minimum transit cost distance (MTCD), shape index (SI), flatness level (FL), and area index (AI) from two aspects of the accessibility and operational efficiency of agricultural machinery; (2) establishing a framework for delineating priority areas with extensive scenario analysis abilities, which can provide multiple interfaces for delineation with different goals or policy preferences.