CHANGES IN THE NUMBER AND STRUCTURE OF FARMS IN POLAND

Abstract

The aim of the research was to assess the scale of changes in the number of and spatial variations in the agricultural structure of farms in Poland taking place at the beginning of the 21st century. The publication is a review and is based on the results of National Agricultural Censuses from the year 2002 and 2020 conducted by Statistics Poland as well as the reports on the activity of the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture covering the period 2004-2020. Voivodeship was adopted as the basic study unit. The publication consists of two main parts. The first one is an analysis of the changes in the number of farms. The second one is assessment of the similarity of the agricultural structure of the farms located in individual voivodeships. The conducted analyses have confirmed that there was an increase in the percentage of farms characterised by a larger size in the period under study. An interesting observation is the fact that in most of the voivodeships under study the agricultural structure of farms was slowly but clearly becoming similar. The polarization of farms in terms of their size in the surveyed groups of provinces is also deepening.