Providing information on how local, state, and international policies have affected the agricultural enterprise, this book aims to observe the process of change in the structure of agriculture and the change in the position of family farming in Europe and North America within this structure.

Much has happened since agricultural economists and rural sociologists met at the University of Chicago in 1946 to discuss family farming. The problems and issues related to the structure of agriculture have been intensified by current economic considerations, which promote the growth of larger-scale commercial farming operations and edge out many smaller farms owned, operated, and worked by families. In this book, contributors from eleven nations in Europe and North America provide a comparison of farm structure under different economic and political systems, including Poland as an...