The breeding is the most affected, the number of farms specializing in the production of milk or meat having plunged 31%.
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Every ten years, France launches a great census of its farms. An exercise imposed by Brussels and orchestrated on the same tempo in all twenty-seven countries of the European Union. On the national territory, 1,500 investigators, based on an online questionnaires campaign, have auscultate the profession between October 2020 and May 2021. The Ministry of Agriculture has revealed the first results of this operation, Friday, December 10, Knowing that the final assessment will only be delivered until April 2022 and that the end of 2022 will have to discover the entire European panorama.
First observation, not least, the ranks of French farmers continued to be released. In a decade, their number fell by 21%, from 490,000 in 2010 to 389,000 in 2020. Thus, nearly 100,000 farms were removed from the map, in metropolitan France, over this period. The department stresses, however, that this dynamic, initiated in the 1970s, is less strong than in the previous decade. The pace of these “disappearances” increased from 3% to 2.3% per year.
The breeding is the most affected by this sharp decrease. The number of specialized farms in the production of milk or meat has plunged 31%. Result, while in 2010 breeders, on one side, producers of crops (cereals, oilseeds, beets, potatoes …), arboriculturists and winemakers, on the other, did almost equal game, the deviation S ‘ is dug. Plant specialization farms have become the majority and weigh 52% of the total, when livestock specialists represent only 37%. The mixed farms, called “polyculture-livestock”, also yield a little ground and close the 10%. Today, France is first of all a land of field crops, with 112,000 specialized farms. Then comes viticulture, with 59,000 operators. Beef producers (48,000), meanwhile, arrive thirdly.
In the case of cultivated agricultural land, the surface remained almost stable at 26.7 million hectares or nearly 50% of metropolitan territory. Very logically, the size of the farms increases, with an average of 69 hectares. The extension of the surfaces is more marked for breeders, the dimension of dairy farms passing on average from 78 to 106 hectares in ten years, when that of cattle producers for meat grows from 65 to 85 hectares and that of producers cereals and oilseeds, from 80 to 96 hectares.
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