New study confirms that field sizes increase with farm sizes

03 September 2024

Farm sizes are an essential indicator for environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. However, in most countries, data on farm sizes are missing. What is not missing is data on field sizes, as remote sensing and machine learning techniques allow to derive field boundaries for many regions of the world. This raises the question if farm sizes can be derived from field sizes or, in simpler terms: "Do larger farms also have larger fields?". We examined this question for Germany, where information on field and farm sizes is available from agricultural subsidy applications. As these data are even more accurate than satellite data, they provide us with the optimal scenario to examine the field to farm size relationship. Our results suggest that, indeed, field sizes increase with increasing farm size. Farm size can be reasonably well predicted for farms of 50–7,000 ha, especially at aggregated scales. However, there are some uncertainties, especially for smaller farms. Our study presents the first empirical insights into the FFR, opening future research directions towards producing spatially explicit farm size predictions at scale.  Read more here:

Jänicke, Clemens ; Wesemeyer, Maximilian; Chiarella, Cristina; Lakes, Tobia; Levers, Christian; Meyfroidt, Patrick;  Müller, Daniel ; Pratzer, Marie; Rufin, Philippe (2024)  Can we estimate farm size from field size? An empirical investigation of the field size to farm size relationship .  Agricultural Systems  220