A method for understanding the ownership structure has been developed
Who owns fields, meadows and pastures in Germany? The owner is always entered in the land register. However, there are no statistics on how much land is in the hands of investors and how much actually belongs to professionally active farmers.
However, a team of scientists at the Thünen Institute, led by Andreas Tietz, has developed a method that allows reliable statements to be made about the ownership structure.
About 80 percent of agricultural land is owned by individuals. However, about 45 percent of the area is owned by non-farmers.
Only 1/3 of agricultural land belongs to family farms
Only about one-third of farmland is owned by family farms, with 8 percent owned by agricultural enterprises such as cooperatives. Another 11 percent comes from the public sector, including churches. Most landowners live in the same community.
In eastern Germany, relatively little agricultural land belongs to family farms. In the east, ownership of these properties is mainly in the hands of companies.
More than 2/3 of private owners have their headquarters where the property is located
For the study, the researchers took a random sample of property data from 95 percent of all communities in eleven federal states. They identified more than 235,000 individual owners of about 690,000 hectares of agricultural land.
According to the Braunschweig researchers, land ownership is predominantly locally anchored. More than two thirds of privately owned agricultural land is owned by individuals and companies based in the same municipality as the property. Around 90 percent of the areas are located in the same federal state. Only 0.4 percent of agricultural land is owned by individuals and companies based abroad.
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