The characteristic feature of the agricultural sector in many countries is the fact that farms, which can be treated as a specific type of an enterprise, may be handed over, unlike enterprises in other sectors, to family members. The property accumulated through generations is handed down to the successor, to the succeeding generation. The process of transmission of farms is called succession. As it is in the case of any family business, the transmission of a farm to a successor constitutes one of the critical stages in its development because it entails not only the handing over of property but also the transmission of managerial responsibility and control over the family. Thus, succession has not only economic aspects (transmission of property, assets, managerial functions) but also social aspects (a change of social role or professional status, for example, when a person earlier deciding about the conditions of existence changes into a subordinated person or a person vocationally active retires), legal aspects (the transmission of ownership rights) and psychological aspects (concern over one's livelihood). The development of a farm constitutes a cycle and can be referred to a logistic function if the language of mathematics is applied. Succession has a multidisciplinary character and it exerts a strong influence on the operation of the agricultural sector and especially on the shape of the market of land and, consequently on the relations between the remaining factors of agricultural production. In this paper the probability function of the logistic type was applied to analyse factors determining the probability of succession. In case of farms, a decisive role in the succession processes is played - both in the positive and negative sense - by the demographic factors (age and the number of members forming a family) and by the economic ones. An increase in the successor's age by one year causes that the probability of succession grows by 87.8 %. However, succession is determined also by the source of income earned by the family of farmers. The more stable and certain this source is the greater becomes the probability of succession. Other factors, such as financial status (acreage, property, etc.) have a minimal or limited influence on the probability of succession.
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