abstract: This paper discusses the development of agrophysical investigations in Poland on the background of the activity, lasting for 35 years, of Bohdan Dobrzański Institute of Agrophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences in Lublin.
The attention has been paid to the requirements which are expected from the contemporary agriculture to be fulfilled by the science - the application of very precise research methods, after all the physical methods. It has been proved that without an intensive support from agrophysics, equipped with the research tools and methods of the sciences, it would be very difficult to be up to the challenges of the contemporary agriculture.
The origin and development of the Institute as well as its participation in creation of the research area for agrophysical studies in Poland have been discussed. The main directions of scientific studies, being now performed in the Institute, as well as some chosen research achievements of the Institute from the latest 7 years have been presented. It has been shown that the development of the Institute of Agrophysics reflects the development of agrophysical research in Poland. Due to the development of the Institute of Agrophysics, its close and active co-operation with different institutions in Poland as well as the contacts with the abroad centres, the agrophysics became a Polish scientific specialisation.
At its beginning, agrophysics concentrated mainly on the studies of soils and plant materials. As the time went by, the field of its activity expanded successively, covering, on the one hand, more and more elements of the soil-plant atmosphere system, and on the other hand, the increasing number of stages of the food production process and its quality - beginning from the stage of agricultural production through the storing of the agricultural products, their processing until the moment of obtaining the final product. Agrophysics became useful in the protection of environment in its broad sense through participation in the studies of degradation of not only the arable soils but also bogged areas in the aspect of creation and emission of greenhouse gases. At present, agrophysics is a subject of interest of many agricultural disciplines. It is used for interpretation of interactions, designing, controlling and optimization of the processes. It finds broad application in the protection of environment, in the soil science, in the soil tillage and plant growth, in agricultural engineering, in the agricultural-food technology and in many other fields.
Despite its short history, agrophysics evolved rapidly, and today it goes far away off the problems, which were originally given the prefix agro. Generally speaking, agrophysics can be considered as a set of these elements of physical sciences, which are applied in the investigations connected with the production and processing of any biological materials.