Tag: farm income

This paper analyses the composition and volatility of the total income and wealth of dairy farmers and the importance and volatility of the different components contributing to their total income and wealth based on Dutch FADN data. The results confirm some existing findings on the stabilising impact of CAP subsidies and off-farm income on farmers’ total income. The paper extends the existing analyses by exploring the impact of taxes on income volatility and the important role of savings in stabilising consumption of farm households. In this paper we show that a broader perspective (including off-farm income and wealth) provides a more realistic picture of the income and wealth effects as experienced by farmers.

The measurement of farm economic sustainability has received intermittent academic interest in recent times, while the conceptual discussions are often quite limited. Moreover, this concept receives more attention at periods of difficulty for the sector. The measurement of farm viability is an important precondition to enrich these discussions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more comprehensive and detailed measurement techniques to provide more clarity on viability and vulnerability levels in the sector. This paper refocuses attention on this issue, using a pilot dataset collected at farm level across a range of EU Member States which facilitates the assessment of an additional category of viability, namely that of economically sustainable farms, i.e. farms that are economically vulnerable but which are deemed sustainable by the presence of off-farm income. Differences in viability and economic sustainability across the eight surveyed Member States are shown. The analysis is sensitive to the factors included in the measurement of viability as well as to the threshold income used to define viability. Although this is a pilot study, it enhances our understanding of the factors affecting cross-country evaluation of viability and sustainability, and the policy instruments that could improve viability levels.

This paper illustrates the regional diversity in terms of the agricultural income of economically weak farms in Poland (i.e. from 2 to 8 ESU). The results, expressed as average values for 2005-2009, indicate that farms are finding themselves in a very difficult situation. Furthermore, the assessment included farms that gained their income not only through agricultural activity, but also through doing non-agricultural work. The diversification of income sources created the opportunity to sustain less profitable agricultural production while providing a higher standard of living for farmers and their families. Such factors as the intensity of production, and the productiveness of current expenditures and fixed capital, as well as the financial position of the farms and the level of their debt, have been analysed. An important aim of the study was to identify the influence of the Common Agricultural Policy on the performance of farms.