As the tractors arrived in Brussels yesterday, it is important to keep a sense of perspective. European farm incomes broke a new record high in 2025 – also in real terms – although not all farmers participated in this. But amid all the doom and gloom spread about an industry on its knees (a narrative with an explicitly political objective), and despite the evident challenges, it is even more important to keep an eye on the underlying facts.
The record farm income is reported in Eurostat’s first estimate of the economic accounts for agriculture earlier this week. This gives a snapshot of the economic health of the agricultural sector, summarised in what Eurostat calls Indicator A.
Indicator A represents an index of the real factor income per annual work unit (AWU) in agriculture. It measures the remuneration of all factors of production (land, capital, labour) by the equivalent of each full-time worker in the agricultural industry, presented in real terms (adjusted for inflation) and expressed as an index.… Read the rest
