TRENDS OF THE PROCES OF MODERNIZATION OF FARMS MANAGED BY YOUNG FARMERS.

The paper presents an analysis of the farms manager by young farmers. The research was carried out in 2018 in the Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodeship and included two groups, including 32 young farmers and 48 farmers aged 40 or over. Participants of the study were farmers who cooperate with the Warmian-Masurian Agricultural Advisory Center and run development farms, with a commodity character of production. The aim of the research was to find the answer to the question whether young farmers using preferences under the Common Agricultural Policy are more willing than other farmers to modernize the farms which they manage. In the group of young farmers covered by the survey, the average area of farms managed by them was 31.47 ha, while in the case of farmers over 40 years old an average area of their farms was 112.46 ha. Older farmers owned 3.5 times larger farms compared to representatives of the group of young farmers. Young farmers worked on their own, while the older farmers mostly employed hired workers. The modernization of farms was mainly financed by own capital, while all of them, without exception, used the available support for modernization of the farm. Due to the high costs of modernization of production, and above all the necessity to increase its scale by purchasing land, further development of farms run by young farmers will be slow, evolutionary, as was the case for farms run by farmers from the comparative group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]