Prospects for the Development of Small Farms in Poland

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the directions of changes in the group of small farms in Poland resulting from the influence of the instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy. The results of our own surveys, carried out on a representative group of 296 small farms in 2016, were used. The results of the empirical studies presented in this paper show that the assistance rendered to small farms within the framework of selected instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy was conducive to their transformation into modern entities, due to the support of their modernization processes, changes in the scale and structure of agricultural production, thus contributing to the economic strengthening of the farms. The investments concerned the extension of the land area and manpower resources in farms only to a small extent, but they resulted in a more efficient use of the resources obtained so far. Positive changes were also made in the degree of the yield of marketable agricultural output of the farms analyzed. Due to the great heterogeneity of small farms in Poland, in the future, they may step onto different paths of change, focusing on the development of agricultural activity, its continuation, or liquidation.

Can a pursuit of productivity be reconciled with sustainable practices in small-scale farming? Evidence from central and eastern Europe

“…However, small farms encounter many development barriers and gain relatively little from agricultural policies due to i) direct exclusion of small farms from the benefits of rural development measures through threshold criteria (Dwyer, 2014;Toma et al, 2021); ii) administrative difficulties and relatively high transaction costs including cognitive burdens (European Parliament, 2014;Vigani & Dwyer, 2020); iii) path dependency in post-socialist countries (Gorton et al, 2009;Żmija & Żmija, 2018 ); iv) the limited number of policy measures dedicated to small farms in the EU and the EU's associated countries compared to other regions of the world (Stępień & Maican, 2020;IPC-IG, 2019). The answer to this problem could be to some extent the new delivery model (NDM) of the EU CAP, starting in 2023.…”

Material Investments as a Factor of Restructuring Small Agricultural Holdings with Non-agricultural Activities

“…Their permanence is a result of many noneconomic factors determining the behavior of the owners of these entities on one hand and of the fact that the owners usually also have non-agricultural or unearned sources of incomes, which make small holdings, contrary to the big ones, resistant to different economic incentives and less vulnerable to increasingly frequent fluctuations on agricultural markets. Additionally, they are dependent on political changes and unstable agricultural policy to a lesser extent [4,7,10]. Therefore, they will surely prevail in many Polish regions for a long time to come.…”