Agricultural labor employment is an important social and economic problem in traditional farming regions.Problems related to surplus amount of labor and shortage of cultivated land are discussed by valuing the labor carrying capacity of land resources in this paper.The concepts of minimum per capita cultivated area required,index of growing area size pressure and labor carrying capacity of land resources are put forward,and the amounts of surplus labor are computed for various counties.Results indicate that the minimum per capita cultivated area required is 0.39 ha under practical income standard,while practical per capita cultivated area is 0.34 ha.About 53.3×104 agricultural labors should be transferred under practical income standard in northwestern Shandong Province,accounting for 14.9% of the total agricultural labors amount.The index of growing area size pressure K=1. 18 >1,which shows that cultivated land is under pressure.The result shows that operational size of farmland per capita is so small that it is difficult to improve production efficiency.Therefore,transfer of labor forces to non-agricultural sectors should be practiced to reduce the amount of agricultural labors.