Spatiotemporal evolution of China’s silage corn industry and the factors driving its development

To promote the better implementation of the ‘Changing Grain to Forage’ pilot program, the coordinated development of the agricultural planting structure from the ‘food + economy’ dual structure into the ‘food + economy + forage’ ternary structure is needed. In this study, the silage corn industry in China was used as an example of this development process, and comprehensive models and methods, such as industrial concentration assessment, center of gravity models, and exploratory spatial data analysis, were used to analyze the characteristics of its spatial and temporal evolution and the driving factors behind this. The results showed that the degree of agglomeration of China’s silage corn industry became very high from 2001 to 2016, with an obvious three-staged pattern in its development through time. The industrial center of gravity was found to be relatively stable, and industrial development has occurred in a spatially unbalanced manner. From a global perspective, there a positive spatial autocorrelation was found in the production of silage corn, which is thus spatially agglomerated. At the local scale, there is was significant regularity, in which production was agglomerated densely in the north and sparsely in the south, and the positive agglomeration of production tended to increase at the local scale. The spatiotemporal patterns in the evolution of the silage corn industry in China have been less strongly affected by natural resource conditions, while policies, economic benefits, market fluctuations, and agricultural science and technology have been the main drivers affecting the spatiotemporal evolution of the industry. The development of the silage corn industry in China and its spatial and temporal evolution has also been closely related to the development of the dairy industry.