Betriebs- und Unternehmensstrukturen in der deutschen Landwirtschaft: Workshop zu vorläufigen Ergebnissen und methodischen Ansätzen

Many of the farm enterprises in Germany comprise several legally independent farms. These enterprises in the agricultural and the agriculture-related sectors are often split between several members of one family. Especially due to professionalization and growth in agricultural diversification and production commercial farms emerge beside the original farm. This trend and the statistical coverage of such structures can cause difficulties for policy analyses. For this reason the Thünen-Institute started a research project on farm and enterprise structures in the German agriculture. The main goal of the project is to find out how prevalent are complex structures in German agriculture and how are these covered by the official agricultural statistics. Within the project there was a regional empirical study on the basis of expert interviews carried out so far in order to estimate the prevalence of complex farm structures. Moreover the available data sources about agriculture and agriculture-related sectors as well as applied survey methodologies were analyzed with the help of literature and data research and numerous expert interviews. As part of the project workshop, the preliminary results of the research project on the topic “Farm and enterprise structures in German agriculture” were presented and discussed. The results so far show that the current methodology of official agricultural statistics in Germany can cover only a part of the units relevant to policy analysis and consulting in terms of company and company structures. Furthermore it was found out that neither of the currently available information sources on agriculture or the agriculture-related sector can provide further insights regarding complex farm and enterprise structures as far as these sources are not combined with each other. Therefore the next work steps are to estimate the overall extent of individual farm and enterprise “unites” (for example, biogas plants). These results will be completed with an empirical study. After that the influence of complex structures on the income situation of agricultural households should be estimated. In the context of the workshop, four keynote presentations were held on the following topics: (1) dealing with complex companies in the German Statistical Business Register; (2) the consequence of missing information regarding complex structures in policy analysis; (3) managing complex farms in German official agricultural statistics; as well as (4) the agricultural statistics system in Austria.