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In many countries of the world, rural areas are characterized by a defective spatial structure of agricultural land. The most frequent defects are large fragmentation and distribution of farmland. The fragmentation of land has been an issue widely described by many authors throughout the world. The problem of the distribution of land owned by individual farmers is slightly different, since due to the complexity of the problem this issue was not widely explored in Poland (plot patchwork) or in other countries of Europe and the world. Land fragmentation and distribution of plots in rural areas has a negative effect on the profitability and efficiency of agricultural production. Land consolidation and exchange is an operation facilitating spatial structure improvement. The authors attempted to develop a universal land exchange algorithm for eliminating the external plot patchwork. As it turns out, so far no land exchange algorithm has been developed. Specific analyses were carried out in Puchaczów commune, county of Łęczna, Lublin voivodeship in the eastern part of Poland, covering an area of 6907.80 ha, split into 15,211 plots. The chequerboard arrays method was used. The publication presents the algorithm and its practical application using a test sample. A result of the studies is a proposal concerning the exchange of land between landowners in the villages of the commune of Puchaczów. Using the algorithm, the area of individual lands in the commune, after the exchange, will increase by 172.09 ha, which is 2.5% for the area of individual lands, and 1.9% for the commune.

The spatial structure of rural areas in eastern Poland is characterized by large fragmentation of privately owned farmland, as well as the scattering of parcels across villages and beyond their boundaries. An important defect is also the unfavourable shape of land parcels, which hampers and sometimes even makes impossible rational management of land in a given area. Shape analysis has been the focus of numerous publications in fields such as geography and ecology, and, more recently, also geodesy. Previous studies show that both the shape and the size of parcels can be improved by consolidation of land. This process allows the creation of new plots with regular shapes, which translates into increased profits and improved living conditions of the farmers. From this angle, it seems necessary to conduct detailed studies of the unfavourable geometry of parcels, because the economic output of a farm is significantly influenced by the width, length, and elongation of the parcels, as well as their shape. These parameters affect both the efficiency of field work and the harvest. The research area encompassed 17 villages of the Księżpol commune, located in the Biłgoraj District in the Lubelskie Voivodship, occupying a total area of 1125.82 ha and divided into 17513 registered plots. The types of villages identified in the study differ in terms of their parcel geometry index, which may be used as one of the criteria for determining the order, in which villages should be subjected to land consolidation and exchange.

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