A new typology for horticultural holdings in Flanders

In the European Union there is a wide diversity of production structures and systems in agriculture and horticulture. To make it easier to analyse the structural and economic results of the agricultural and horticultural holdings, an appropriate classification per type of farming and economic size class has been developed by the European Commission.

Since 1985 this typology was based on standard gross margins (SGM), calculated taking into account the gross output and the subsidies, as well as certain deductible specific costs. In the meantime the common agricultural policy has drastically changed and the majority of the direct payments has been decoupled. Due to this decoupling of direct payments since 2005, it was not possible to maintain the previous typology (Commission decision 85/377/EEC) based on SGM. A SGM without subsidies could be negative and therefore can not be used as classification criterion. Therefore, a new typology has been established, making use of the Standard Output (SO) instead of the SGM. The Standard Output (SO) of an agricultural or horticultural product (crop or livestock) is the average monetary value of the agricultural or horticultural output at farm-gate price, with the exclusion of direct payments, value added tax and taxes on products.

In Flanders horticulture is an important sector, which represents 1.3 billion euro, or 30 % of the production value of Flemish agricultural and horticultural products (Bernaerts et al., 2009). To analyse the structural and economic results of this sector in a meaningful way, it is necessary to dispose of a useful typology for horticultural holdings. Since the number of groups is rather limited in the typology established by the European Commission, a more detailed typology for horticultural holdings is used in Flanders. Due to the change from SGM to SO, this typology needs to be adapted. In this paper a new typology for horticultural holdings is presented.