The Bavarian Agriculture Minister Michaela Kaniber (CSU) continually accuses the Berlin traffic light of using its agricultural policy to force farmers in Bavaria and Germany to give up, thereby causing massive damage to local agriculture. Just this week, Kaniber told the weekly newspaper The time: “The speed at which the traffic light coalition is driving our economy and the agricultural state into the wall exceeds my worst red-green nightmares.” In this context, the minister likes to say that the usual structural change in the Bavarian landscape is in danger of turning into a “structural break” with mass farm deaths.
At least so far, there is no evidence that structural change in Bavarian agriculture has accelerated dramatically since the Berlin traffic light coalition came to power. The current figures from the State Statistical Office in Fürth, which is subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior and is therefore an authority of the state government, also provide no indication of this.
According to this, 11,740 or 12.6 percent of the farms in Bavaria gave up within ten years. But 8,544 companies or 9.2 percent did this between 2013 and 2020. Between 2020 and 2023, 3,200 or 3.8 percent of the companies closed. The Berlin traffic light has only been in power since November 2021. Since then, Green politician Cem Özdemir has been Federal Minister of Agriculture. In the previous 16 years, the CSU politicians Horst Seehofer and Ilse Aigner as well as the CDU politician Julia Klöckner were responsible for the federal agricultural policy.
Structural change is occurring much more rapidly among livestock farmers
When it comes to structural change among livestock farms, the state office figures also provide no evidence for Kaniber’s oft-stated thesis that Özedmir and the Greens are particularly interested in a dramatic reduction in the number of livestock. Structural change among livestock farmers has always been much faster than that among arable farmers. According to the state office, almost a quarter of livestock farmers in Bavaria have removed their livestock from the farm in the past ten years. For pig farmers it was more than half, and for cattle farmers it was just over 28 percent. According to Bavarian statisticians, the abandonment rate among all livestock farmers for the years 2013 to 2020 was 19.2 percent. From 2020 to 2023 it was 6.3 percent.
The winners are the organic farmers. The evaluations by the Fürth statisticians agree with the statements from Kaniber and Özedmir. According to the State Statistical Office, in 2023 there were 10,810 organic farmers in Bavaria. That’s a whopping increase of almost 72 percent compared to 2013, and almost ten percent compared to 2020. Kaniber can certainly claim this success – since she took office in 2018, she has seamlessly continued the commitment of her predecessor Helmut Brunner (also CSU) to the expansion of organic farming in Bavaria.
Incidentally, the agricultural area in Bavaria has remained almost constant. In 2023 it amounted to almost 3.1 million hectares or almost 44 percent of the Free State. The decrease compared to 2013 is 1.6 percent, compared to 2020 it is 0.7 percent.