The European Union regularly keeps records of its agricultural holdings and of the people working on them; doing a census every ten years and surveying a random sample every 3-4 years.
I’ve been exploring these surveys, primarily to understand how agriculture in Europe is distributed, because I’m interested in two loosely related topics:
Who works on agriculture in Europe, how many people? Under which contract and which condition? What do agricultural policies say about them? And, do they have say on agricultural policies?
Which plant is cultivated in Europe? Where do the seeds come from, who controls the germlines?
Not all of these information can be gained from European reports and neither from eurostat statistics. But I started from there, to lay some fundaments for my research an interests.
While exploring Eurostat reports and datasets, I’ve found one interesting observation: In Europe there are 11 Million agricultural holdings and “only” 22 Million people working on them; a very low 2 workers per holding. Probably, a big part of those holdings are small fields for personal or local use, which do not require a regular workforce for maintenance.
This information is contained in a dataset from eurostat code-named ef_kvaareg, which stores Key Farm Variables. I have analyzed it, to see if it can bring me closer to answering my questions.
Some info on the dataset
The Key Farm Variables dataset measures six variables from three survey (2005, 2007, 2013 and one census (2010). The variables are:
- Utilised agricultural area [acres].
- Livestock units [LSU], if any.
- Total number of holdings.
- Labour force directly employed by the holding.
- Standard monetary output in Euro.
- Total area [acres].
These five measurements are aggregated at the state level and at the NUTS2 regional level. The measurements are also aggregated as total or binned by the size of the agricultural holding.
These features make this dataset a strange in-between raw data and a fully aggregated and tidy set. One can reason that having the pure raw data would be more informative, but understandably, aggregated data are much easier to use.
I for a first analysis I’ve inspected data aggregated at the state level and not binned by the size of the holding.
Three observations
Most European Countries have similar numbers of workers per area dedicated to agriculture, and workers per holdings and monetary outcome (of the holding, not income of the worker). Moreover, and maybe more importantly, these variables are changing across Europe with similar trends.
These are the (worrying?) trends that I have observed in this dataset:
- The cultivated area is either stable, or is showing small increases or decreases.
- The monetary outcome is increasing.
- The number of holdings and the number of workers employed by it are decreasing.
Cultivated area and agricultural employment are decreasing
The number of workers per cultivated are looks uniform across Europe, with the most developed states having less workers per acres, and others having more.
But you can see two trends:
- The cultivated area is decreasing almost everywhere with few exceptions, such as the United Kingdom, Croatia, Greece, Bulgaria and Ireland.
- The number of workers is decreasing even more, with one exception: Ireland.
These two trends are not inherently “bad”: agriculture damages the environment, and agricultural works are among the physically hardest, less rewarded and most dangerous.
But you can wonder, the workers that were previously employed by the owners of the holding, what they are they doing now?
Workers per holding are decreasing
The trend here is scary evident: The number of the agricultural holdings is decreasing as fast as the number of workers.
Meanwhile output is increasing
Last an inverted trend, while the number of workers is decreasing, the average monetary output of agricultural holdings is almost uniformly increasing.
Resources
The code to analyze and visualize the data on my Github page.