The ‘Arable Farming’ working group advisory service has been a successful nationwide training and advisory focus for many years. The top priority here is the higher qualification of farmers. Farm comparisons are an important part of the working group's work. The evaluation and analysis of individual farm records and the presentation of the most important production and economic parameters, together with the exchange of experience, form the basis for the work of the working group.
Objective
The aim of the project is to analyse technical production and economic data and, building on this, to produce a national report based on the farm branch analyses of the participating working group farms. The recorded data can be used, for example, to estimate crop rotation effects, determine the yield potential of individual fields or compare the economic efficiency of crop rotations. The possibility of benchmarking allows the strengths and weaknesses of a farm to be determined and individual farm strategies to be identified. In this respect, the Federal Institute of Agricultural Economics and Mountain Farming supports the working groups in data preparation and verification (machinery costs), the further development of the content of the working group's work and the preparation of reports.
Status of the project
As in previous years, the farms recorded field-specific data in 2024. This data is entered into a central web-based database, subjected to a plausibility check, processed, analysed and presented in the form of a federal report. For the year 2024, the database includes 698 conventional or organic farms with a total area of around 30,094 ha in the federal states of Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Burgenland and Carinthia. In addition to processing the machinery costs (plausibility checks, calculation), writing individual chapters of the report is one of the main tasks of the Federal Agency for Agriculture. Since 2017, the data has been analysed on the basis of the revised online field catalogue.
Work in 2024
In 2025, all farm data transmitted at field level must also be transferred to the existing interface of the database, checked and analysed. In this respect, it is necessary to carry out a plausibility check of the data in advance and to adjust the values in the database in accordance with the ÖKL guideline values for machinery and equipment. A comparison of the machine costs with the ÖKL data is planned for the 2025 analyses and, if necessary, indexing of the machine costs. Furthermore, cooperation in the preparation of the federal report is also planned again.
