Abstract: The circulation of agricultural land was an important means to achieve large-scale operation and promoted farmers’ income. It was of great significance for rural development and poverty alleviation to deeply explore the problems related to the circulation of agricultural land. Based on the theory of planned behavior, using the field survey data of Lingchuan county, Shanxi province, this paper used the mediating effect model to test whether the willingness of farmland transfer had a mediating effect on Farmers’ cognition and farmland transfer, and further used the binary logistic regression model to analyzed the influencing factors of the deviation between farmers’ willingness and behavior. The results showed that, farmers’ willingness to transfer had a significant mediating effect on the relationship between farmers’ cognition and farmland transfer behavior;73 households were willing to participate in the transfer of agricultural land, accounting for 47.4% of the total, and 81 households were willing but not willing to transfer, accounting for 52.6% of the total;The main influencing factors of farmers’ turnover intention and behavior deviation include farmers’ gender, farmers’ occupation, family population, family cultivated land, family income, abandoned cultivated land and farmers’ cognition. On the basis of this study, the problems of farmland transfer in the current study area were discussed.

Key words: farmland transfer, farmers' cognition, mediation effect, will and behavior deviation