Court dying

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Former farm on the Dutch island of Texel
Former farm in Neuhemsbach

As farms dying or Hofsterben one caused by various causes massive task of agricultural enterprises designated. A common cause is a lack of profitability . For example, farms have to give up because they are less productive than other competitors in the production of agricultural products. Then they run the risk that the price obtained when selling the produce does not cover the cost of agricultural production.

From a historical point of view, today's farm deaths are a long-term consequence of the agricultural technological revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and the industrialization of agriculture over the last few decades. These developments were characterized by mechanization (through innovations in agricultural engineering ) and chemization ( e.g. through the introduction of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers ). The resulting opportunities to increase productivity determined from then on competition and the existence of farms.

Farm death changes the agricultural structure of an area. Furthermore, there are effects on the social structure ( social fallow land ) and the natural balance as well as on the townscape and landscape . Key and Roberts found that farm subsidies , along with other factors such as technological advancement , increased the average farm size. There are conflicting results on the effects of subsidies on income. The Heinrich Böll Foundation criticizes the EU's common agricultural policy because it would put smaller farms at a disadvantage.

Situation in Germany

In the 2011 agricultural report , the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture showed that the number of farms in Germany recently fell by 2.2 percent annually. Around 1.1 million people were still working in agriculture. The average area of ​​the farms increased from 52 to 56 hectares in the investigation period 2007 to 2010. During this time, 55 percent of the agricultural area was cultivated by large farms covering more than 100 hectares of agricultural land. The Heinrich Böll Foundation criticizes the EU's common agricultural policy because it would put smaller farms at a disadvantage. According to the Federal Statistical Office , the number of farms fell from 1,017,697 in 1971 to 448,936 in 2001 to 288,200 in 2012. The number of small farms in particular fell dramatically. A lack of farm succession plays a major role here. By 2013, the number of farms in Germany had fallen to around 285,000. The number of holdings with at least 100 hectares of agricultural land increased by around 3,400 to around 35,200 between 2007 and 2013.

Between 2013 and 2016, the total number of farms fell by a further 9,000 or three percent to 276,000, with the areas and livestock used remaining roughly the same. The number of farms keeping cattle fell particularly sharply. Their number fell eight percent to 184,000.

According to the BÖLW , an average of one farm per hour has had to cease operations since 2005 (as of 2019). On the other hand, there was a strong increase in organic farms during the same period .

Situation in Austria

In Austria the number of farms fell between 1990 and 2005 from 281,980 to 189,591. A study carried out between 1991 and 2004 showed that organic farming in Austria is also undergoing a structural change based on the principle of "grow or give way", ie professionalization, expansion and concentration of operating capacities or abandonment or withdrawal of agriculture.

Situation in Switzerland

The Switzerland counted in 2016 a total of 52'263 farms, 990 less than in 2015 (-1.9%). The total agricultural area (1.05 million ha) remained stable. These results emerge from the 2016 agricultural structure survey by the Federal Statistical Office . The valley area (−1.8%) and the mountain area (−1.9%) were equally affected by the decline in the number of farms. As in previous years, the number of farms with a usable area of ​​more than 30 hectares rose across Switzerland (+1.9%), while the downward trend among micro-farms was unstoppable (-2.9%). The boom in organic farming that has already been observed in recent years is continuing: in 2016 there were 6,348 organic farms, i.e. H. 104 more than in the previous year. The trend continued in 2019 as well.

literature

  • Alexander Zorn: Key figures on structural change in Swiss agriculture based on individual farm data . In: Agroscope Science . No. 88 , 2020 ( admin.ch [PDF; 1.8 MB ]).

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Rösener : The farmers in European history , CH Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37652-5 , p. 9 ( online )
  2. ↑ Nigel Key, Michael J. Roberts (2007): Commodity Payments, Farm Business Survival, and Farm Size Growth. ( September 3, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive ) US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, ERR-51, November.
  3. ^ Bruce L. Gardner : American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost . Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0674007484 .
  4. ↑ https://www.boell.de/de/2019/01/09/hoefesterben-wachsen-oder-haben
  5. ↑ Farm death in Germany continues . Article from May 7, 2011 in the merkur-online.de portal , accessed on January 22, 2014
  6. ↑ Agricultural Policy Report 2011 , website in the portal bmel-statistik.de (Federal Agency for Food and Agriculture), accessed on August 24, 2017
  7. ↑ https://www.boell.de/de/2019/01/09/hoefesterben-wachsen-oder-haben
  8. ^ Dorothea Elsner: Höfesterben continues . Article from July 25, 2013 in agrar-presseportal.de , accessed on January 25, 2014
  9. ↑ Lower Saxony: Two out of three businesses without a successor to the farm ( memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Article from October 26, 2011 in the agrarheute.com portal , accessed on January 25, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.agrarheute.com
  10. ↑ Unresolved succession . Website in the portal hofgruender.de , accessed on January 25, 2014
  11. ↑ Farm succession in agriculture (answer of the Federal Government of November 14, 2012, Drs. 17/11464, to a small inquiry, Drs. 17/11256). In: Letters on Agricultural Law , Issue 1, 2013, p. 10 , accessed on the nl-bzar.de portal on January 25, 2014
  12. ↑ The number of large agricultural businesses in North Rhine-Westphalia quadrupled . Article from March 11, 2015 in the proplanta.de portal , accessed on March 13, 2015
  13. ↑ The trend is towards larger companies Article from January 20, 2017 in the Handelsblatt , accessed on February 9, 2017.
  14. ↑ BÖLW: Industry report 2020 (PDF; 7.9 MB) Organic food industry. In: boelw.de . February 2020, p. 10 , accessed on February 25, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Manuela Larcher, Stefan Vogel: Qualitative analyzes of household strategies and development directions of organic family businesses in Austria , In: GJAE 59 (2010), Issue 2, p. 106, PDF file, accessed on January 25th from the portal ageconsearch.umn.edu 2014
  16. ↑ Manuela Larcher, Stefan Vogel, p. 114
  17. ↑ Federal Statistical Office: Agricultural Structure Survey 2016 In: admin.ch , May 11, 2017, accessed on February 25, 2018.
  18. ↑ Federal Statistical Office: The number of farms continued to decrease in 2019. Agricultural structure survey 2019. In: admin.ch. May 11, 2020, accessed May 12, 2020 .