Status: 07/14/2021 1:17 p.m.
The number of farms with organic animal husbandry has risen by 41 percent within ten years. In total, one in ten of the 168,800 animal-keeping farms nationwide was an organic farm in 2020.
More and more farms in Germany keep their animals according to ecological principles. According to the agricultural census, the number of these farms has increased from 12,300 to 17,300 in the past ten years. That’s a 41 percent increase since 2010.
The organic share of the total number of farms with animal husbandry rose from six to ten percent, according to the Federal Statistical Office. That was one in ten of the almost 169,000 livestock farms in Germany. In 2010 it was only six percent.
More and more organic cattle
13,000 farms kept cattle organically, it said. That was 34 percent more than ten years earlier. During the period, the organic cattle herds rose to 861,300 animals and thus to eight percent of the total cattle herd.
In the case of chickens, there has been an increase of two percentage points since 2010: On the reference date in 2020, around 8.3 million animals were kept organically in 5,400 farms. Their share made up five percent of the total chicken population nationwide.
Poor pigs
Other animal species are less represented, as the statisticians further reported: Although the number of pigs kept organically rose by 36 percent, the proportion of the total pig population was just under one percent in 2020.
The proportion of organically kept goats (33 percent) and sheep (13 percent) in the respective livestock was significantly higher.
Every tenth company operates ecologically
A total of 26,100 farms in Germany now operate ecologically. That is an increase of 58 percent since 2010 and corresponds to around a tenth of all businesses.