STABILITY EVALUATION OF THE NUMBER OF FARMERS FARMS AND DECLARED AGRICULTURAL LAND IN LITHUANIA

The beginning of the restitutional land reallocation reform in 1991 brought a rapid change in agricultural land utilisation and user groups resulting in the decrease of state land users' categories and the growth of private agricultural land areas used by farmers and other natural and legal entities. The aim of the article is to analyse the stability of farmers farms and their agricultural areas in Lithuania during the period between 2009 and 2014. The research estimates the stability of the number of farms and the utilised agricultural area in separate Lithuanian administrative units, i.e. municipalities. The survey results revealed that the most stable farmers' land holdings group was farms that utilised more than 10 ha of agricultural land. The number of farms stability coefficient in Lithuania is 1.08 on average. The complex index of the stability of the utilised agricultural area in Lithuania is 1.13 on average. The value of index is the lowest only in 8 of the 51 municipalities in Lithuania, i.e. from 1.00 to 1.09. This means that the farm land use in those districts is the most stable since the municipality has no possibilities to increase it significantly by ploughing up or otherwise using the abandoned and fallow land.