Uses and Benefits of FADN Information in the EU‐28

Abstract

Summary The benefit from information contained in FADN results and those of national farm accounts surveys comes from the improvements that are made possible in decisions by public policymakers and by farmers. Direct valuation of these benefits is difficult and attention has to focus on publication of results and uses by EU central institutions, national governments and the private sector, especially farmers. FADN is used by the European Commission for the analysis and evaluation of economic policy relating to the agricultural sector comprising ‘commercial farms’ and results are published as statistics for both the EU and Member States. Almost all national governments use their results for similar public purposes but most also make them available for the provision of advice to farmers and benchmarking of their own performance. Member States differ in their views on whether the national survey would continue in the absence of the legal obligation to supply data to FADN. The Netherlands provides an example of data collection that is broader than is required for FADN and which enables a wide range of policies to be serviced, with a judgement by its government that it therefore represents good value for money.

The agrarian question in dairy farms: An analysis of dairy farms in the European Union countries

“…3 The FADN is a survey conducted by EU member states to assess farm incomes and the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The sample comprised 'commercial farms' that account for the large majority of production, more than 90 per cent (Hill et al 2016). The data from this survey has been complemented with Eurostat 4 data on dairy farms in EU countries.…”

Farm sustainability data for better policy evaluation with FADN

“…The Netherlands is one of the few countries that has already a more extensive re-use of data from not only administrative but also from commercial information flows (ECA, 2016;Hill et al, 2016). The farmer interacts with all kind of private and governmental organisations and for the compilation of the farm accounts the data collector uses information from these information flows (Figure 4.1).…”

Collecting sustainability data in different organisational settings of the European Farm Accountancy Data Network

“…Bottlenecks experienced are legal restrictions in combining data sources and the identifi cation of the (same) farm in different systems. The Netherlands is one of the few countries with a more extensive re-use of data from not only administrative but also from commercial information fl ows (ECA, 2016;Hill et al, 2016). The farmer interacts with all kinds of private and governmental organisations and for the compilation of the farm accounts the data collector uses information from these information fl ows (Figure 1).…”