Minister Sven Schulze: “Our strong agricultural businesses are a defining feature of Saxony-Anhalt. Despite many challenges, they ensure every day that we get high-quality and healthy food on the table. In order to maintain our diverse and now more than ever sustainable agriculture in Saxony-Anhalt in the future, we will continue to support farmers as best as possible.”
In 2023, there were 4,150 agricultural holdings in Saxony-Anhalt, including livestock holdings without agricultural land. This has 1,152,100 hectares of agricultural land. The average farm size was therefore 277.6 hectares. This puts Saxony-Anhalt well above the national average of 65.0 hectares. Compared to 2013, the average farm size (2013: 277.1 hectares) was constant, as both the number of farms (2013: 4,232) and the agricultural land (2013: 1,172,781 hectares) declined slightly.
The most common legal form of the farms was that of a sole proprietorship (2,620), followed by partnerships/partnerships (880) and legal entities (650). Although farms in the legal form of legal entities only accounted for 15.7% of all farms, they managed 42.8% of the agricultural land in Saxony-Anhalt.
Compared to 2013, cultivated arable land areas decreased by 2.3% to 976,900 ha. In contrast, however, the area of permanent grassland, for example, increased by 1.8% to 172,800 ha. Saxony-Anhalt thus followed the nationwide trend. Across Germany, cultivated arable land areas decreased by 1.6% (2023: 11,681,400 ha) and permanent grassland increased (+1.8%; 2023: 4,704,200 ha).
The number of cattle (-19.5%; 2023: 268,200), pigs (-27.4%; 2023: 895,000) and sheep (-29.5%; 2023: 62,500) kept has declined significantly since 2013. The number of chickens kept had increased by 51.6% to 12,963,200 animals in the period under review up to 2023, contrary to the national trend (-2.8%).
The major trend towards more organic farming continued. In 2023, there were 600 organic farms in Saxony-Anhalt (2013: 342). Compared to 2013, the organic area has more than doubled (2013: 53,362 ha; 2023: 117,100 ha). The share of organically farmed land in the total agricultural area has thus increased from 4.6% to 10.2% in the period. More and more farms with livestock farming are now also farming organically. The number of farms that practice organic livestock farming has increased by 58.7% in the last 10 years, from 189 to around 300 farms. In organic pig farming, both the number of farms (2013: 27; 2023: 20) and the number of animals (2013: 11,422; 2023: 7,800) are declining. In chicken farming, although the number of farms decreased (2013: 46; 2023: 40), the number of animals increased to 310,900. In contrast to conventional cattle farming, the number of organically farmed cattle doubled rapidly (2013: 12,382; 2023: 24,400). The number of cattle farms increased by 65.5% to 230 during the period mentioned.
A possible response to changing weather influences can be seen in the increased use of irrigation, soil erosion protection or modified tillage methods to maintain soil fertility. The irrigated area in Saxony-Anhalt increased by 46.7% from 15,200 ha (2012) to 22,300 ha (2022) in the period under review. Erosion protection measures were surveyed for the first time in the 2023 Agricultural Structure Survey for the months October 2022 to February 2023. According to this, 94.3% of all arable land was covered with soil cover during this period, most frequently by winter crops (67.1%), as erosion protection. Conservation tillage (e.g. cultivating and harrowing, 703,400 ha) replaced ploughing (192,600 ha) as the most common tillage method in 2023.
President Reichelt says: “The results of the agricultural structure survey clearly show that agriculture in Saxony-Anhalt is undergoing a transformation due to the growing awareness of ecological responsibility and also due to changes in (processing) technologies, without losing its economic importance.”
Agriculture's share of Saxony-Anhalt's gross value added (EUR 71,622 million) in 2023 was 2.6% (EUR 1,892 million). Only in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was agriculture's share of gross value added higher at 3.7%. A total of 20,800 workers, mostly male (14,400), were employed in this sector, 4,900 of them as seasonal workers.
