Development of Selected Aspects of Small Farms in Chosen EU Countries

Despite the opinions of many politicians or economists, it seems that there is some renaissance in finding the importance of small farms for the rural areas. There are many classification systems to identify small and large farms. In the EU this was a difficult task compared to the US since there are many differences in member states. Eventually, it was agreed that economic output should be used to measure small farms. The following article aims at observing the differences between small and large farms in selected EU member states. The difficulties in the complex analysis of all member states lie in the different approaches in collecting the data on small farms. Over half of them does not collect or publish these data. The analytical part of the article focuses on the total utilized agricultural area, the total output of farms, gross farm income and total labour input. The results show us that while the number of small farms is decreasing their economic viability is slowly rising.