ABSTRACT
The adoption of European Common Market principles has been the main driving force behind dairy sector restructuring in Poland after EU accession, strongly affecting the income situation of farmers (Wilkin et al. 2007). Today further policy changes may be expected. Dependence on policy related transfers (market price support and direct income support) means that farm incomes are increasingly exposed to price and income risk related to Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms. The most recent studies of the dairy sector in Poland focused predominantly on the issue of dairy farms’ efficiency and the relationship between profitability and cow herd size (Parzonko 2006). Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to investigations of dairy farms’ income risk in changing policy conditions. Available studies on farmers’ income and revenue risk, although providing valuable insights, do not analyse the problem in the Polish context (Moschini et al. 2001) nor the dairy sector in particular (Majewski et al. 2008). To fill this gap the present study examines the impact of changes of key policy factors on the income risk of Polish dairy farms in the context of the years 2013 and 2018.
