Jack Woodhead and European Farming Statistics

Apologies for the delay in this week's blog entry, this was due to a combination of network and other problems.

It is with great regret that I bring you news that the long term member of Eurolink, Jack Woodhead, has died and a celebration of and thanksgiving for the life of Jack occurred on Wednesday the 19th of October 2011. A full obituary of Jack's life willl appear in a future blog posting. Our thoughts go to Alison, their family and friends.

On looking at a document from the European Statistics Office complied by Ole Olsen, entitled "A regional picture of farming in Europe - what, where and how much?"; I found that in 2007 the output of the 27 European countries (EU-27) was worth 360 billion Euros. Ninety three percent of this (335 billion Euros) being the value of core farm products including the associated subsidies.

The agricultural product of the above number was broken as 57.5% cropping and 42.5% with animals.

In the EU-27 (2007), a total of 172 million hectares are farmed in some way.

The new member states of the EU (NMS-12) are growing more arable crops (72.4% in 2007) compared to the original member states (EU-15), which is 56.2% in 2007. However the EU-15 are growing, what is classed as, more permanent crops, such as vineyards and fruit tree plantations to name a couple, 7.9% compared to 2.4% in the NMS-12. More information can be found in the linked document.