Higher casual farm workforce bucks overall falling trend
© Tim Scrivener The agricultural workforce in England has bucked a year-on-year trend with new figures showing a growth in the number of people employed in farming.
The June Survey of Agriculture puts the number of people employed in agriculture at 301,000 on 1 June 2022, up from 297,000 the previous year and representing a 1.3% increase.
Farmers, business partners, directors and spouses account for 60% of the total workforce with those numbers seeing little change, increasing by just 0.4%.
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Regular worker numbers remained largely stable at 67,000 people, but there was a 7.3% jump in casual worker numbers to 41,740, after a three-year cycle of contraction since 2018.
Recorded for the first time in the survey was the national identify and ethnic group of farmers and holders.
That data shows 99.8% of the farmers who participated selected white as their ethnic group.
Seventy percent of the 17,600 farmers who responded to the survey selected British as their national identity and 28% English.
The percentage selecting Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish was 0.4%, while 0.6% selected “other”.
Land ownership, tenure and use
Farmland ownership in England has increased by 1.3%.
Defra’s June Survey of Agriculture shows that the utilised agricultural area (UAA) is 8.9m ha and accounts for 69% of the total area of England in 2022, compared with just over 8.8m ha in 2021.
Ownership of that land has increased to 6.2m ha, from 6.1m ha in 2021, while the land rental figure at 2.6m ha is almost unchanged.
Forty-three percent of this rented land is covered by farm business tenancies – these agreements are now applicable to almost 1.3m ha.
Meanwhile, there has been a fall of just over 2% in land subject to Agricultural Holdings Act tenancies, to 1,196,236m ha from 1,223,712m ha; this represents 41% of total farmland rentals.
The area of land rented on a seasonal basis increased by 5% to 549,000ha.
The census shows that just over half of agricultural land is used for growing crops, while permanent grassland. at 41% of UAA. is up by 2.4% to just over 3.6m ha.
Arable crop acreage remained relatively static at 3.7m ha, with cereals making up the majority of that area covering 2.6m ha.
Potato production was down by 9.1% to 93,000ha, and there was a 5% dip in the acreage of horticultural crops grown to 124,000ha.