The competitive potential of family farms

Baranyai, Zsolt – Takács, István

Keywords: family farm, sustainability, effectiveness, competitiveness

Our investigations highlighted the effectiveness problems of agricultural production. Obviously, a farm’s effectiveness improves in tandem with the growth of the concern. We found two realistically workable solutions. One is based on farmers’ collaboration and co-operation, ensuring agricultural competitiveness through “virtual” large-scale formations. The other possibility is a structure based on feasible and competitive family farms, which is far from an innovative idea. In our opinion under current domestic conditions – depending on production structure – in arable plant production a concern of 2-300 hectares is the size that can be hoped to produce competitively. At the same time we must admit that co-operation between farmers still cannot be omitted in the case of farm concentration at this level, which, even if not manifest in production processes understood in their narrowest sense, will certainly be present at various points in the vertical chain (e.g. processing).