German farmers have been keeping 25 percent fewer pigs and 18 percent fewer cattle for ten years. But the trend is towards larger companies.
According to the Federal Environment Agency, agriculture caused 13 percent of greenhouse gases in Germany in 2022, including emissions from soil and machinery – the majority of which came from animal husbandry. Livestock excrement is largely responsible for polluting groundwater with nutrients. At the same time, the agricultural industry generates the lion's share of its turnover with animals.
Because of their high economic importance, it is a problem for the industry that the number of farms with pigs has fallen by 41.7 percent to 15,600 since 2014. From 2023 to 2024 alone it fell by 3.4 percent. The number of farms with dairy cows is now 36.4 percent lower than ten years ago. Compared to 2023, it shrank by 3.8 percent to 48,600.
Since the number of animals fell much more slowly during this period, the trend towards larger companies continues: While in 2014 a company kept an average of 1,100 pigs, ten years later there were 1,400 animals.
Greenpeace criticizes the growth of the remaining farms
For these reasons, the environmental organization Greenpeace sees the trend as ambivalent. On the one hand, Germany can only achieve its climate and biodiversity goals if the number of animals falls by at least half, said taz Matthias Lambrecht, the association's agricultural expert.
“On the other hand, it is not a good development that the death of farms continues while industrial animal husbandry is concentrated in ever larger farms.” This would mean that more and more nutrients from the “flood of manure” would fall into certain locations. If farms have more and more cattle, it will be difficult to keep them on pasture instead of just in the stable. The state would have to prevent such undesirable developments through targeted funding.
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