Almost 280,000 people working on farms - 2020 agricultural census confirms

Some 278,000 people worked on 130,200 Irish farms of more than five hectares in size in 2020, according to the 10-yearly census of agriculture completed by the Central Statistics Office. In 2010, there were 139,860 farms in Ireland; the total in 2000 was 141,527.

The standard output – “mean gross production” – per farm was €48,380 while half of farms had a standard output equal to or less than €13,566 in 2020, the final census figures released on Thursday confirm.

On farms under 10 hectares, the mean standard output was €12,557, while on farms above 100 hectares it was €276,891. Specialist dairying and other farm systems had the largest mean standard output in 2020, with €209,006 and €338,416 respectively.

Of the 278,600 persons contributing farm work, 47 per cent (130,200) were “the farm holders”, 41 per cent (114,300) were family members, and the remaining 12 per cent were non-family workers (34,100).

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More than half (53 per cent) of farm holders stated that farming was their sole occupation and less than half (46 per cent) of farm holders had a succession plan in place.

Of those working on farms, 73 per cent were males, accounting for 80 per cent of the volume of farm labour based on annual work units, while 27 per cent were females.

There were 1,686 farms engaged in organic farming based on livestock or land use, accounting for 73,800 hectares of the 4.5 million hectares of agricultural area utilised in the State. There were 51,685 organic cattle, 74,870 organic sheep and 161,471 organic poultry on Irish farms in 2020.

Sustained expansion of the Irish dairy sector has continued over the past decade, resulting in record numbers of dairy cattle, preliminary results of the 2020 census published last December confirmed.

While the overall number of farms fell by 3.4 per cent to 135,037 between 2010 and 2020, there was a 46.4 per cent increase in the dairy cow herd, a 15 per cent decrease in other cows and an 8.8 per cent increase in all other cattle. This combined to establish a 10.7 per cent increase in total cattle.

There were 1,567,681 dairy cows in 2020, the highest dairy herd total ever recorded in a census of agriculture. There were fewer farms with dairy cows (17,495) in 2020 compared with 31,809 in 2000. The average size of herd is 90 dairy cows, which is 53 greater than in 2000.

Selected statistics are available at electoral district level on the CSO’s open data portal Pxstat, which includes the number of agricultural holdings, average size of holdings, livestock numbers, age of holders and land utilisation. This can be accessed through its website cso.ie