ИСТИНА

Since the collapse of state-socialist economy rural areas depopulation in Russia went hand in hand with the decline in agricultural employment. The fall in employment can be explained by increased efficiency of the production and the shrinkage of its area. Agriculture concentrates in fertile and accessible locations, where production rebounded to or even surpassed socialist levels, while widespread land abandonment and production decline increasingly dominate in intermediate and marginal areas. In order to provide a better understanding of the scale and driving forces of the concentration of agricultural production, we compared spatial patterns of agricultural activities, namely, changes in cropping structure, farm locations, and spatial distribution of farm revenue between 1973 and 2014 for Tyumen province. We found that farm locations in 2014 largely followed the patterns observed in 1973, resulting in relative stability in cropping patterns. However, the spatial distribution of agricultural revenues and of land-use intensity has changed fundamentally in the areas close to the urban cores and in the periphery. The increasing polarization of agricultural landscape has been facilitated by vertical integration of the production, resulted in closed value chains and strict functional division between parent companies of agroholdings, located near to cities, and branches, distributed throughout the region.