Abstract

In the agricultural systems of every country, large, highly specialised and automated agricultural enterprises coexist with "small", predominantly subsistence farmers. Small farmers play an important role because they are often crucial to local economies and food systems, fostering a closer connection between consumers and their food sources. Including them in the scope of agricultural censuses would provide a comprehensive picture of the profile of all agricultural operators. However, this strategy often entails lengthy and costly data collection and processing times. Moreover, paradoxically, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what “small” agricultural units are.
“Small” farms are often identified using a subjective size threshold based on the amount of land, livestock, or revenues. FAO proposed the definition of “Small-scale food producer” (SSF), fundamental for calculating the Sustainable Development Goal sub-indicator 2.3.2 (Average income of small-scale food producers). SSFs are those units that occupy the lowest 40% of the cumulative distributions of land, livestock and revenues and that have a revenue level below a certain threshold. However, this methodology could imply the identification of a too large and unrealistic number of SSFs due to the presence of some very large units. Another proposal by FAO is the concept of “Household farm”: a family farm is an agricultural holding which is managed and operated by a household and where farm labour is largely supplied by that household. This is a general concept that gives the idea of the characteristics of a household farm, but that is not easy to apply, because it does not correspond to universally agreed statistical criteria needed to identify household farms.
In the European Union context, a discussion has just started on whether or not to include household farms, as well as hobby farms, in the observation field of the next agricultural census of 2030. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a clear and shared definition of what household farms and hobby farms are. A simple, yet simplistic, approach is to associate household farms with their legal form: household farms are those with a legal form equal to “individual enterprise”. Based on the 2020 agriculture census, in Italy, this approach would identify an unrealistically large number of household farms, more than 93%. Similar results applied to the whole EU as well.
In this framework, we propose a potential census-based methodology for identifying household farms that can closely approximate the rural concept of “small” farm. The methodology has these features: 1) It is based on logical criteria, namely the possession of specific features. 2) It relies on a limited number of indicators, which are very often available based on censuses or structural surveys. 3) It does not analyse each unit in relation to the others (as occurs when identifying SSFs according to FAO), because the presence of extremely large units would affect all comparative analyses based on cumulative shares concerning specific totals and would lead to the identification of too many "small" units. Household farms are those units that meet all of the following conditions: A) They have the legal form of "individual enterprise." B) They employ only family workers in addition to the farm manager. C) They do not engage in the following additional gainful activities: agritourism, educational farms, social agriculture, renewable energy production, or third-party work. The rationale is that these activities could not be managed by household farms. D) They consume more than 50% of their farm's production. E) They have an annual standard output of less than €8,000. This threshold is subjective, but that is the same threshold used by many EU Countries, as Italy, in the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) context.
Based on this methodology, in 2020 there were 295,698 household farms operating in Italy, the 26.1% of the total. This large share of farms explains the 0.25% of livestock units and the 3.62% of the utilised agricultural area. Their average size is 1.5 hectares, compared to the 14.3 hectares of market farms (non-household farms). Within the household farms subset, we can identify hobby-farmers as well, whose importance is widespread throughout the world. Hobby farmers are those household farmers who satisfy both of the two additional conditions: F) They employ only the farm manager's workforce. G) They have no revenues at all. Based on these further conditions, 142,797 hobby farms would be operating in 2020, 48.3% of household farms and 12.6% of the total agricultural units counted in the census.
Unlike complex classification methods, this methodology allows for understanding why a unit is classified as a household farm. Furthermore, it can also be applied to sample survey data. Based on the results of the integrated farm sample survey (IFS), carried out in each EU country in order to update the 2020 census results. we estimated that in Italy in 2023, there were about 284 thousand household farms, down 4% compared to 2020.