He assessment of agricultural use of mountain village grasslands - on the example of their spatial arrangement
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Uniwersytet Rolniczy w Krakowie
Katedra Geodezji Rolnej, Katastru i Fotogrametrii, Poland
Publication date: 2015-06-30
Geomatics, Landmanagement and Landscape 2015;(2)
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ABSTRACT
The agriculture in mountain areas is still one of the main sources of income for their inhabitants. The faulty land layout of highly fragmented farms and dispersion of lands have no positive
impact on their agricultural use. However, abandoning agricultural production due to the functions it fulfils in these areas for the cultural landscape, natural biodiversity, is neither imaginable
nor even possible. Clean natural environment, friendly to organic farming and favourable conditions to livestock and pasture farming still make the agriculture an important economic activity in these regions. The economic significance of agriculture in mountain and sub-mountain
regions has been decreasing, because tillage of these lands requires more effort and its productions costs are higher. That is why the financial support for these regions is necessary. The study
attempts to prove the following: because the agriculture in these regions is based on traditional
livestock and pasture farming, these lands are agriculturally useful, especially when they are
used as grasslands. The study was carried out in a mountain village Polski Spisz (near Nowy
Targ) that has one of the highest land fragmentation index, where the average 5 ha farm consists
of 45 land plots (parcels), and the mean size of a land plot designed for grassland is only 0.1 ha.
In the whole village there are almost no parcels larger than 1 ha that would be appropriate for
tractor tillage. It is necessary to carry out rural management works and to transform agricultural
lands, change the current structure of land use by significant reduction of arable lands in favour
of grasslands.