Opinion:The Central Statistics Office has published the final results of the 2010 Census of Agriculture. This is the first full Census of Agriculture conducted since June 2000 and the purpose of it was to provide a snapshot on the main structural features of farming in Ireland. There were many changes in agricultural policies, markets and returns from 2000 to 2010, the most important policy feature being the introduction of a single decoupled farm payment in 2005.

The structure of agriculture is very challenging and has, if anything, disimproved in recent decades, allied to the fact that agricultural output is still only at about the level of 20 years ago. Over time there has been substantial and unremitting change with fewer and larger farms, specialisation and concentration of production, less employment and growth in part-time farming. These trends are clearly evident in the 2010 census results.

There were 139,860 farms in June 2010 compared to 141,527 farms in June 2000. The returns on the number of farms are somewhat surprising. The decline in the number of farms in the 2010 census was only 1.2 per cent, or less than 0.1 per cent per year, but the decline from 170,578 in 1991 to 141,527 in 2000 was 17 per cent, or at annual rate of about 1.5 per cent.

On this basis therefore, the annual decline in the number of farms was more than 10 times greater in the 1990s than in the last decade. It should also be noted the decline in the number of farms from 1980 to 1991, was substantial at 24 per cent or about 1.8 per cent per annum.

By way of explaining the stabilising of farm numbers, the scale of land market transactions slowed down considerably in the decade up to 2010 as the amount of land traded in that period was the lowest in decades and the introduction of the single farm payment was probably a factor.

A quite disturbing aspect of this census is the deterioration in the age structure of landholders. In 2010, more than a quarter of all farm holders were aged over 65 years, compared with less than 20 per cent in 2000, while the proportion aged less than 35 years more than halved in the 10-year period to about 6 per cent.

Concentration

The increasing concentration in agricultural production is also demonstrated in the census results. This is particularly true for so-called farmyard enterprises. Less than

1 per cent of holdings were involved in pig farming and 1,200 farmers now produce about the same number of pigs as 2,800 did 20 years ago.

With respect to the land-based enterprises, there has been a reduction in the number of holdings with cattle from 124,000 to 111,000 between 2000 and 2010 – from 87 per cent to 79 per cent of holdings – but a more dramatic example of concentration is where 18,000 farmers now produce more or less the same volume of milk as 62,000 did when the milk quota was introduced in 1984.

The proportion of farms with sheep has fallen over the decade from 31 per cent to 23 per cent, while about 8 per cent of farms are engaged in cereal production compared with more than 10 per cent in 2000.

Land renting is another major structural feature of Irish farming. In 2010, 30 per cent of farmers rented land that represented 17 per cent of total agricultural land used, surprisingly slightly less than in the previous decade but considerably more than in the 1990s. Farm fragmentation has, however, increased noticeably. The average number of parcels per farm was 1.9 in 1991, rising to 3.1 in 2000 and 3.8 parcels in 2010.

Potential

In some respects structural change in farming has slowed down over recent decades. A larger proportion of the utilis- ed agricultural area is now in the hands of part-time farmers and an ever-decreasing number of farms account for an ever- increasing share of production.

Increasingly, there is a decline in the number of farmers in intensive enterprises with operators whose further potential is thwarted by the low degree of land mobility, while the proportion of farms in the more extensive system is growing all the time.

This situation is particularly relevant in the context of a projected 50 per cent increase in milk production by 2020 as outlined in Food Harvest 2020, where land availability could be a major obstacle to its attainment.

* Brendan Kearney is economic consultant and former assistant director of An Foras Talúntais (now Teagasc)