Romania has the biggest number of farms in the European Union, but almost half (44.3 percent) of farm managers are 65 years of age or more and only 7.6 percent are less than 40 years old, Eurostat data show.
More than a quarter (25.7 percent) of farm managers in Romania are aged between 40 and 54 years and 22.3 percent are between 55-64 years old.
One third (33 percent) of the EU’s farms were located in Romania in 2016, another third being found in Poland (14 percent), Italy (10 percent) and Spain (9 percent), according to Eurostat.
Romania is the most contrasting EU member state in terms of agricultural land, with nine in every ten farms (92 percent, or 3.1 million farms) smaller than 5 ha, while 0.5 percent of farms are 50 ha or more in size and farm half (51 percent) of all the agricultural land in the country.
In the EU, the average age of farmers is very much at the older end of the age spectrum: one third (32 percent) of farm managers were 65 years of age or more and only 11 percent were young farmers under the age of 40 years.
“Young farmers were particularly few and far between in Cyprus (3.3 percent of all farm managers), Portugal (4.2 percent) and the United Kingdom (5.3 percent). They were more common in Austria (22.2 percent), Poland (20.3 percent) and Slovakia (19.0 percent),” Eurostat said.