- 1ARHS Developments, Luxembourg (The work was performed fully at JRC's Ispra site premises under the contract FL1745JOS) (jon.skoien@ext.ec.europa.eu)
- 2European Commission - Eurostat, Luxembourg
- 3IIASA, Vienna, Austria
- 4European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
The last European agricultural census, organized by Eurostat, took place in 2020, collecting more than 300 variables on agriculture and farm structure from 9.03 million farmers in the EU (and EFTA countries Iceland, Switzerland and Norway). Data are aggregated to NUTS 2, NUTS 1 or national levels before they are publicly released on the Eurostat website due to confidentiality regulations that do not allow individual data to be disclosed.
With a newly developed methodology, it is now possible to create multi-resolution grids of these variables, where the size of the grid cells depend on the spatial density of the data. All grid cells respect a series of confidentiality rules, such as a minimum number of farms per grid cell (at least 10) a dominance rule (the largest contributes cannot have more than 85% of the total production in a grid cell) and a quality rule (estimates must have an estimated coefficient of variation less than 35%).
We will here present a range of thematic maps based on the 2020 European agricultural census to highlight regional and country differences, giving a new insight in the geographical patterns of agriculture in Europe, some expected, some more unexpected. All of them correspond to contextual indicators for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and are divided into three broad categories: structural components (i.e., agricultural holdings, land use, livestock patterns, and labor input); the demographics of farmers (i.e., age, gender, and skills); and agricultural production methods (i.e., irrigation and organic farming).
For example, our analysis shows that high farm densities occur in plains and fertile valleys, while organic farming is concentrated in areas with high grassland proportions. Young farmers' holdings are located in a belt from France through Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. These data sets allow for more local policy evaluation and offer researchers opportunities to draw causal spatial inferences. The data are available through the Gisco viewer:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/geospatial-data-agricultural-census
How to cite: Skøien, J. O., Lampach, N., Ramos, H., See, L., Gaffuri, J., Koeble, R., and van der Velde, M.: High resolution maps of European agricultural indicators, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-16510, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-16510, 2025.
