Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many farmers there were in (a) St Helens, (b) Merseyside and (c) the North West in each year since 2010.

Statistical estimates of the number of farmers on commercial agricultural holdings are shown in the table below. Farm labour data is sourced from the Defra June Survey of Agriculture but detailed geographical data are only available in the years where the survey is sent to a larger sample of farms.

Farmer are defined here as full time and part time principal farmers, business partners, directors and spouses.

Number of farmers in St Helens, Merseyside and the North West 2010 to 2021

Notes

: represents data that are not available as the survey was too small to produce geographical breakdowns to this level of granularity.

- represents data that has been suppressed to protect confidentiality, due to the small number of values in this cell

(a) Data is only available at this detailed geography in large scale survey years (2010, 2013, 2016, 2021)

(b) It was not possible to run a full-scale June Survey in 2020 due to the Coronavirus outbreak and as a result, regional breakdowns are not available for that year.

Commercial holdings are those registered with the Rural Payments Agency for payments or livestock purposes and with significant levels of farming activity (as recorded in responses to the Defra June Survey of Agriculture or the Cattle Tracing System). Holdings are only included if they have more than five hectares of agricultural land, one hectare of orchards, 0.5 hectares of vegetables or 0.1 hectares of protected crops, or more than 10 cows, 50 pigs, 20 sheep, 20 goats or 1,000 poultry.

Full data series by region, county and local authority are published here:

Structure of the agricultural industry in England and the UK at June web page.