May 29, 2018

Beef production is most common type of farming in Ireland, survey shows

Specialist beef production was the most common type of farming in Ireland, with over 72,400 farms engaged in this activity, or over half (52.7%) of the total farms in 2016, according to the findings of 2016 Farm Structure Survey, which was released only last week by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO).

Resuts of the survey showed that there was a total of 137,500 farms in Ireland in 2016, of which 137,100 were family farms.

A total of 16,700 specialist dairy farms (12.1% of all farms) were recorded in 2016.

There were 7.2 million cattle, of which 1.4 million were dairy cows; 5.1 million sheep; 1.6 million pigs; and 11.053 million poultry on Irish farms in 2016.