Summary:

A forecast of socio-economic changes in agricultural holdings and sustain-able agriculture until 2030 was presented against the background of necessary energy and ecological changes occurring in rural areas and in the whole Poland.
Results of Agricultural Census of 2010 (PSR'10) and initial results of Na-tional Census (GUS) of 2011 were used to determine the trends of changes in rural areas and in agriculture. It was forecasted that by 2030 about 39% of the population of Poland will live in rural areas constituting 33.0% of individual households. Farmer population in agricultural holdings over 1.0 ha AL will con-stitute 13.3% of rural communities and 5.2% of the whole country population. There will be about 530 thousand commodity farms (agricultural enterprises) which will supply to the market almost all commercial output of food raw materials. Introducing sustainable production and new technologies based on modern machinery aggregates will diminish unit labour and energy outlays, simultaneously contributing to an improvement of ecological requirements for soil, water, air, plants animals and human protection in rural areas. Agriculture will reduce methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission to the atmosphere, among oth-ers through increased use of renewable energy sources (RES). A critical and re-served attitude should be adopted towards burning of straw, grain, wood and other kinds of unprocessed or processed biomass (e.g. biofuels).
Developed ITP forecast allows for implications concerning further realiza-tion of agricultural policy and technical infrastructure in rural areas, among others protection of agricultural lands, small farms, development of technical services and agricultural processing, and increase in energy efficiency