The small-scale agricultural structure, commonly found above all in the east and south of Poland, is seen as undesirable by Polish policy makers, who assign a high priority to the promotion of change from small to larger units. Against the background of multiple social-ecological crises, often tied to practices of intensive, industrial and large-scale agriculture, the question must be raised whether these efforts can achieve the goal of sustainability. To investigate this issue, an empirical study was carried out in two regions of a small-scale agrarian structure in the east and south-east of Poland with the aim to see what life situations and economic activities could be found in small farms and whether they could provide a counterweight to the multiple social and ecological crisis phenomena in agriculture. The present article focusses on three different economic models that were pursued by the interviewed farmers (economically successful full-time farming, part-time farming out of choice and farming out of economic necessity), on the main motivations underlying the farmers' activities (the desire for a secure existence and for autonomy) and on challenges that small scale farmers have to face with respect to the current institutional and economic-political environment for agriculture. The study's findings show that the economic activities pursued on the investigated farms can contribute to the sustainable development of rural areas only in a limited sense; what they demonstrate above all is the urgency of the change needed in the economic-political framing conditions for agriculture if nature-conserving agricultural practices, which are at the same time financially attractive for the farmers, are to make their contribution to the sustainable development of rural areas.