The average farm size in Ireland is more than double that of the EU average, a recent survey carried out by Eurostat has revealed.

The data gathered, which is the latest available, reflects EU land used for agriculture in 2016.

Ireland's average farm size is 32.3ha, compared to the EU average of 16.6ha.

The survey showed that Europe has a large number of small farms, with 65% of the farms less than 5ha.

Romania is home to one third of the EU’s farms however 92% of these farms were less than 5ha.

Countries where larger farms dominated were Luxembourg, France, the UK and Denmark. Farms of 50ha or more make up 52% of farms in Luxembourg, 41% in France, 39% in the UK and 35% in Denmark.

Agricultural output

The agricultural output from member states was showed no correlation with the number of farms per country.

While Romania had the most farms by some distance in the EU they accounted for just 3.4% of the EU’s standard output.

The big contributors to the EU’s standard agricultural output were France (17%), Germany (13%), Italy (12%) and Spain (11%). Out of 10.3 million farms in the EU, four million had a standard output of €2,000. The 296,000 farms which had an output of €250,000 contributed 55% of the EU’s total agricultural economic output in 2016.

Just four countries account for over half of the EU’s agricultural land with France farming 27.8 million hectares of the total 171 million utilised agricultural area (UAA) in the EU.

Spain, the UK and Germany follow the French with the amount of land used for agriculture.

In Ireland, agricultural land use is very prominent with 72% of land in Ireland being used for agriculture. At the other end of the scale was Sweden with agriculture only accounting for 7% of a forestry dominated landscape.

The survey gives an overview of the agricultural productivity of the member states and will be an important reference point in relation to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

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