(28 June 2018) – Eurostat today publishes the provisional results for the 2016 EU Farm Structure Survey. The survey is the latest snapshot available, and it helps better understand the structure of agricultural holdings in the EU, important for the Common Agricultural Policy.
A little over 171 million hectares of land in the European Union were used for agricultural production in 2016 – about 40% of the EU’s total land area. This supported about 10.3 million farms and farm managers.
Although numerous, most of the EU’s farms were small in nature, two-thirds being less than 5 hectares in size. In contrast, the 3% of EU farms of 100 ha or more in size worked over half of the EU’s utilised agricultural area.
In 2016, only 11% of farm managers in the EU were younger than 40 years old, in contrast to one third (32%) who were 65 years of age or older.