Social and Economic Consequences of Changing Cultivation Pattern and its Role on Rural Development Case study: Changing Cultivation Pattern of Rice to Citrus in Balatajan County of Mazandaran Province

Cultivation pattern as one part of agricultural system can have an effective role in obtaining the agricultural and rural development goals which, in fact is the improvement of farmers’ life and their welfare.Cultivation pattern indicates the type or a combination of cultivation that farmer chooses for optimum use of lands. Choosing any cultivation pattern, due to its multidimensional nature can have important consequences on farmers’ life and rural community. Now, which section of rural community life will be affected and the direction and depth of this influence is the substantial question that we will investigate in this study. In order to answer this question, library and field studies were conducted. The field studies were related to the Balatajan village in Mazandaran Province and agriculture year 2010. For this purpose, we selected 250 farmers who replaced production of citrus instead of rice and asked them about social and economical effects of these changes.Our research findings showed that in these two parts, there had been a significant difference before and after changing the cultivation pattern and at Alpha 0.01.In social indices, except of participation, in two aspects of durability and farmer awareness, the results showed the index growth and in economical index, this growth is more sensible in the quality of employment, welfare and economical safety. Therefore, on this basis, it can be said that citrus cultivation pattern has made effective role on development of Balatajan county.