Competitive position of Polish agricultural holdings in the process of integration and globalization

The aim of the article was to show the result of the research on the effectiveness and competitiveness of Polish agricultural farms. The study backed up for results from the system of collecting accountancy data agricultural farms (FADN). This data was collected from agricultural holdings with the economic size below 4, 4-8, 8-16, 16-40, 40-100 and higher than 100 ESU (European Size Unit) in 2008 and 2009. The field of ob-servation of this article included specialist cereals, oilseed and protein crops farms, specialist permanent crops farms, specialist dairying farms and specialist granivores farms. The indicators of effectiveness and competitiveness was income per FWU (Family Work Unit) and management income. The competitive specialist cereal farms have 16-40 ESU and about 100 hectare UAA (utilised agricultural area), specialist permanent crops farms have 40-100 ESU and about 7 hectare UAA and specialist dairying farm have 28 dairy cows. Moreover, the competitive specialist granivores farms have 36 cows or 400-600 tones of poultry meat from farm. The estimate number of competitive farms in 2010 equalled to two hundred twenty thousands, also their share in total number of farms under 1 hectare amounted to about 14%. The share of the farms is very low.