The Farm Structure Surveys, also known as the Survey on the Structure of Agricultural Holdings, are the methodological basis for censuses of agricultural operations throughout the European Union. The survey itself is used as the basis of an decennial European Union-wide census of agriculture as well as for sample surveys conducted between these years.
Overview
At present, the Farm Structure Surveys are legislated through Regulation 1166/2008 of the European Parliament. Regulation 1166/2008 legislates both the decennial census of agriculture as well as follow-up surveys in 2013 and 2016. The focus on these standards is to provide “comparable data on agricultural activities, at the appropriate geographical level, and covering the whole Community” for the purposes of informing the Common Agricultural Policy within the European Union and agricultural policy within individual states. The census of agriculture is not operated concurrently to censuses of population throughout the European Union.
Methodology
While the individual methodology of the Farm Structure Survey varies country to country, the focus is on observing each individual “agricultural holding” and their characteristics, including land, livestock, and labour force characteristics as well as rural development measures. This agricultural holding, “a technical-economic unit, under single management, engaged in agricultural production” is the base unit of observation in the Farm Structure Surveys. Before 2007 this was defined as one hectare of “utilized agricultural area,” but since has become flexible, allowing individual countries to exclude only the smallest agricultural holdings which contribute 2% or less to total Utilized agricultural area or farm livestock units. Beyond this, specific physical thresholds are also given for inclusion:
Utilised agricultural area : 5 hectares
Permanent outdoor crops : 1 hectare
Other intensive production:
Fresh vegetables, melons and strawberries, which are outdoors or under low protective cover: 0.5 hectares
As the thresholds have changed varyingly from country to country, this complicates the direct comparability of findings between years and between countries, alongside to the varying agricultural identities and cultures which exist within the European Union. Like other censuses of agriculture, the information observed through the Farm Structure Surveys are protected by confidentiality in both limiting local parameters and aggregation of the reported data.
Publication
Like other agricultural surveys, the results of the Farm Structure Surveys are published for public use. As they are the aggregate of data collection by individual nations statistics agencies, the timeline for data to be shared with the European Commission is twelve to eighteen months after the survey year. This means that the data is shared later than other censuses of agriculture. The most recent European Union Census of Agriculture data can be found in the 2013 Agriculture, forestry and fishery statistics produced by Eurostat.
