From Cultivation Expansion to Value-Chain Extension: Economic Transformation of a Specialty Agricultural Village in Southwest China

Specialty agriculture can provide an important foundation for rural economic diversification, but its sustained development does not necessarily depend on the continuous expansion of cultivated land. This study examines the development of the rose-based specialty agricultural economy in Xiaohebian Village, Mile City, Yunnan Province, Southwest China, using a longitudinal case-study design. Multi-temporal high-resolution satellite imagery, centimeter-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) orthophotos, field surveys, and industry statistics from 2020 to 2025 were integrated to examine changes in cultivation space, agricultural production infrastructure, processing space, and rose-related activities. The results show that within the village-scale study area, rose cultivation increased from 16.01 ha in 2020 to 36.94 ha in 2023 and 39.4 ha in 2025, indicating rapid expansion during 2020–2023 followed by a marked slowdown during 2023–2025. Meanwhile, within the overlapping UAV survey area in 2023 and 2025, the length of drip-irrigation networks increased from 3.46 km to 5.67 km. The area of processing facilities within the village increased from 2852.34 m2 in 2020 to 19,436.42 m2 in 2025, with the most rapid expansion occurring after 2023. Industry statistics further indicate that the total rose cultivation area, including land leased outside the village, increased from 133.34 ha in 2020 to 233.35 ha in 2023, suggesting that rose production expanded not only within the village but also outward through the leasing of land beyond the village boundary. The range of processed products and related business activities continued to increase, while tourism, catering, and accommodation activities also gradually developed. Taken together, the trajectories of these indicators reveal clear stage-specific differences in the Xiaohebian rose economy during the study period: the earlier stage was characterized primarily by rapid expansion of cultivation space within the village, whereas the later stage was increasingly characterized by the expansion of production infrastructure and processing space, together with the diversification of related economic functions. The findings suggest that understanding the economic development of specialty agricultural villages requires attention not only to changes in cultivation scale and output value, but also to the differentiated changes in cultivation space, production infrastructure, processing activities, and related economic functions across temporal and spatial scales. By integrating remote-sensing, UAV, and socioeconomic data, this study provides village-scale case evidence for identifying the spatial restructuring and changes in economic functions associated with the development of specialty agriculture.