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Agricultural retreat

It took much work on harmonising the data for the graphic illustration of the farm abandonment rate between 1980 and 2000 (see Map below). As mentioned within the description of the approach, differing survey limits for farms makes this necessary. Applying the definition of the EU, the map depicts all farms with more than 1 ha UAA (DE: > 2 ha).
According to the results of the last agrarian surveys of 2000, 368,000 farms were operating in the Alpine Convention territory. Most of these operations are located in Italy (170,000, 46%). The lowest farm density is found in France – only 8% of all farms operate on the 21% of the total Alpine area situated in France.

Between 1980 and 2000 in total approximately 160,000 farms (35.8%) > 1 ha utilised agricultural area abandoned activity. This number corresponds to the current number of farms in all of Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Rhineland-Palatinate together, or all farms in Germany larger than 2 hectares! Especially in Italy the number of farms has drastically fallen over the last 20 years by 45%. It must be stressed that most of these abandoned farms must be seen, from the economical viewpoint, as "hobby farms", i.e. as operations with only marginal agricultural activity.
Structural changes in Austria, Germany and in Switzerland, however, have proceeded rather moderately, resulting, though, in shifting the Austrian proportion from one fourth to one third of total farms. Austria is now second to Italy in the number of farms in the Alps.

Farms per 1000 inhabitants: 2000 (632 KB)
Farms < 5ha UAA: 2000 (573 KB)
Farms 5 - 10ha UAA: 2000 (586 KB)
Farms 10 - 20ha UAA: 2000 (592 KB)
Farms > 20ha UAA: 2000 (565 KB)
Farms/km²: 2000 (553 KB)
Development of farms: 1980-2000 (1768 KB)
Part time farms: 2000 (630 KB)
Full time farms: 2000 (623 KB)
Development of the part time farms: 1980-2000 (615 KB)
Development of the full time farms: 1980-2000 (599 KB)