Six years ago, I wrote a post The greying of Europe’s farmers which reviewed the evidence on the ageing of farm operators up to that point in time (the latest data available referred to 2007). The data confirmed that Europe’s farmers were getting older. However, I questioned whether this was evidence of a growing policy problem. Instead, I suggested “that what we observe is a slow upward shift in the age distribution which can be explained by general social trends (longer schooling periods and longer longevity) rather than any specific worsening of the generational transfer problem in agriculture as such.”
The greying of Europe’s farmers continues…
The recent publication by Eurostat of the first results from the 2016 Farm Structure Survey allows us to revisit this issue. The table below shows trends over the period since 2005. Because 2016 data are not yet available for four Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Italy and Luxembourg) I provide two series in the table – one for the EU-28, and the longer series for the EU-24.… Read the rest