Summary:

Agricultural spatial structure in Poland is highly disadvantageous in the extensive area of the country, which especially concerns Southern and South-Eastern Poland. The far-reaching changes of particular parameters of this struc-ture are mostly the result of land consolidation works carried out pursuant to the provisions of the Act on land consolidation and exchange of land dated 26 March 1982.
One of the most important premise qualifying a given area for land consol-idation is excessive land fragmentation, the effect of which is a large number of land plots belonging to individual farms which is usually connected with a slight, average surface of such plot. The data used during the analysis of land fragmentation in a given area is usually obtained via examination of the descriptive part of land and building register survey. The above approach may sometimes result in an incorrect description of the real state of farm spatial structure in a given area, as it was demonstrated in the presented article on the Sękowa village, situated in the Sękowa commune, gorlicki district. In this area one can observe significant discrepancies between the land fragmentation shown in data analysis of land register and the real fragmentation, the scale of which was estimated by treating the adjacent lands belonging to one owner as a single land plot. After analyzing a group of twenty farms with the biggest number of land plots, the difference between the values obtained by these two ways presenting the number of land plots in a farm and the average size of a land plot in a farm was 300% (the increase in the average surface of a land plot from 0.14 to 0.41 ha).