Anyone who has followed the news in recent years has had the impression that farmers are a marginalized group. All the (environmental) regulations make it impossible for them to work and the supermarkets squeeze them dry. Farmers are said to have a lot of “capital” at their disposal. But all that money is tied up in meadows, fields, stables and tractors and simply cannot be eaten. And so the image remains that everything in the countryside is booming.
But according to Statistics Netherlands, the vast majority of farmers actually have a remarkably high disposable income. In 2021, farmers earned an average of €82,000. For comparison: the average disposable income of Dutch households that year was €49,000.
Poultry farmers performed the best, with an average disposable income of 115,000 euros. Three-quarters (74 percent) of them belonged to the richest household group in 2021, measured by disposable income. This is 55 percent of dairy farmers.
At the same time, very few farmers belonged to the group of Dutch people with low incomes, less than 1,130 euros per month. Among farming families this was 5.3 percent, while on average it is 6.3 percent for all Dutch families. Of the families with a pig farm, 12 percent had low incomes, a relatively high figure.
No wonder farmers make a lot of money.
This is the second time in a short period of time that CBS has analysed farmers’ incomes. In December last year, CBS already compared the income of agricultural households with that of other self-employed entrepreneurs and with that of “normal” Dutch households. It then became clear that farmers also earn a lot compared to other self-employed entrepreneurs.
This is not very special, says CBS chief economist Peter Hein van Mulligen. “In ordinary households there are also people on benefits and pensioners. They often have lower incomes. So it is not surprising that farmers have higher incomes.” The fact that he has now gone back to digging into the figures has to do with the fact that there was a “demand” for a more detailed picture of the various occupational groups of farmers.
For example, CBS has now also investigated the disposable income of households with an organic farm. Overall, they earn slightly better than non-organic farmers: 90,000 euros in 2021. On the other hand, they had a slightly higher risk of falling into poverty. But that risk still remained below the risk for the average Dutch household.
CBS looked at household income. This includes everything, including partner income or possible income from a farm campsite.
Crops may fail
The fact that farmers have good incomes compared to the rest of the Dutch citizens requires some nuances, wrote sector economist Nadia Menkveld of ABN Amro four years ago in the economists’ magazine ESB. For example, potato farmers’ crops can fail due to heavy rains and the price of sugar beet can plummet because India produces more sugar. The price of pork can also skyrocket as a result of swine fever in China and a good year can end disastrously if exports suddenly decline, as happened in 2009 as a result of the credit crisis.
Statistics Holland has therefore been looking at the risk of farms falling into poverty for a long time. Van Mulligen and his colleagues looked at the number of households earning below the poverty line over four years. On average, 0.6 percent of farming families belonged to this group. For the entire Dutch population, it is 3 percent.
The accountants did not take into account how many hours farming families have to work to earn this income. “But no one can deny that farmers are the ones who work the longest hours, even more than other groups of self-employed entrepreneurs,” says Van Mulligen. “Therefore, this income does not reach the farmers.”
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