Dilemmas in the definition of family farms (on the example of Poland)

The aim of the paper is to characterise Polish individual farms in terms of compliance of their characteristics with definition of the family farm that is used in socio-economic sciences. The main source of the analysed data were surveys conducted in intervals of several years (most recently in 2011) in the same 76 villages across Poland. The sampling of villages for the surveys was deliberately selected to make the characteristics of the analysed farms proportional to the actual structure of agricultural holdings in Poland, both at the national level and across regions. It was found that Polish individual farms (ie. those operated by natural person and with total area of agricultural land of 1 ha and more) fully meet the eligibility criteria for the group of family farms. However, the fragmentation of agrarian structures in most cases does not allow them to achieve income parity and therefore their economic functions are limited