Our biannual reports on the development of agriculture and rural areas have made a lasting contribution to the dissemination of knowledge on complex processes taking place in Poland’s rural areas, which are essential components of Polish society, culture and economy. All the reports published to date have been interdisciplinary in character and based on the methodological approach that, in our view, is needed for understanding and describing those processes. Such a way of presenting various determinants of growth, trends, structural transformations and development effects visible in rural areas in Poland is the differentia specifica of our Report, when compared with other publications on agriculture and rural development. For us, the slogan “to understand rural areas” is a beacon in methodological and editorial terms. This is not an easy task since the subject matter that the authors of the Report deal with is extremely complicated.