Are farming households different to other rural households in Wales? A view from the AD|ARC project

Stuart Neil is the agriculture and rural affairs statistician working within Welsh Government and a steering group member for the ADR UK-funded Administrative Data | Agricultural Research Collection (AD|ARC) project. In a blog, Stuart discusses the picture emerging from early work on farming households in Wales and how this can help to inform policy decisions that may benefit the people that live in them.

Painting a picture of farming households

The project team’s most recent work is just scratching the surface of what’s possible with the UK data brought together by the AD|ARC project, and there are many people who are keen to see the insights the next set of analyses can provide.

AD|ARC has recently published a Data Insight that focuses on the structure of farming households in Wales and how these compare to other, non-farming rural households. The analysis presents a picture of the characteristics of farm households in Wales and how they compare to non-farming households and the result was clear: farm households have some distinctive features.

Comparing rural households where at least one member was receiving a farming subsidy with those where no one was, the average age and gender split were similar, but several significant differences emerged.

In brief, AD|ARC found that farming households were on average about 25% larger and were more likely to be multi-generational when compared with non-farming rural households. Single occupant farming households were predominantly male (the opposite applied for non-farming households), and a higher proportion of farming couples were in civil partnerships or married when compared with couples in non-farming rural households.

Read more about how these findings can help inform policy in the full blog on the AD|ARC website.