THE IMPACT OF AGRARIAN FRAGMENTATION ON THE DYNAMICS OF REGIONAL CHANGES IN DAIRY CATTLE BREEDING IN THE YEARS 1990–2010

Abstract. Since the commencement of political system transformations in Poland the num-ber of farms keeping cows and the stock of milk cows has been decreasing very fast. A basic factor behind the regional diversity of the process is the scale of agrarian fragmentation and the size of farms. This hypothesis was verifi ed by analyzing changes affecting cows bred in a sector of farms operated by natural persons (private farms) in the entire country and in two regions where private farms predominated. The fi rst region is the south-eastern region characterized by a very unfavorable acreage structure of farms while the other one is the central and eastern region where the structure of farms is relatively favorable. Re-search results clearly indicate that, due to increasing market competition, cow breeding is concentrated and has been moving to higher and higher acreage groups. As a result, strong stock regress has been observed in the region with fragmented agriculture and such trend has been on the increase. However, in the area characterized by the favorable farm structure such regress which marked the commencement of the political system transformations was relatively quickly slowed down; already in the period preceding Poland’s accession to the UE the stock quantity and quality growth emerged which can also be seen during the post--accession era. Key words: dairy cattle breeding, agrarian fragmentation, regional diversifi cation of milk productio