EU farms and farmland by land size class

In the EU too the majority of farms are small, meaning that a similar graph can be made, as shown in Figure 2. However, the seemingly matching graphs show somewhat different pictures. In fact, the approximately 70 % of the smallest farms in the EU include farms with farmed areas up to 5 ha as compared to the 1 ha in the world data. Also, 70 % of all agricultural land is found in the largest 7 % of all farms in EU data as compared to the 1 % of world data. Although this might seem to suggest that the distribution of EU farms and farmland among size classes is more evenly balanced than the distribution worldwide, other facts need to be noted. First, two out of three EU farms with fewer than 5 ha actually operate fewer than 2 ha of farmland, while most of the farmland operated by farms with more than 50 ha is actually found on farms with at least 100 ha. Second, country differences matter, both worldwide and in the EU. The clustering of world figures around the extreme ends of the spectrum is the result of the presence of a large number of very small farms especially in developing countries and of very large farms in certain regions, such as in Australia, where the average farm size is above 4 000 ha. Likewise, in the EU, small sized farms are generally predominant in southern and eastern EU regions, while in other areas only a smaller share of farms fall into this category.