Do large fields belong to large farms? New paper with a quantitative exploration.

What is the relationship between field size and farm size? Due to the lack of quantitative evidence, we explored if farm size can be modeled from field size and ancillary variables in a rich data setting in Germany. The open access paper Can we estimate farm size from field size? An empirical investigation of the field size to farm size relationship led by Clemens Jaenicke and Maximilian Wesemeyer, and featuring several Land Systems for Sustainability team members provides first insights in this matter.

Based on data on 3.4M fields and 169,000 farms, we found a generally positive relationship between field size and farm size, indicating that a positive relationship exists, but that its magnitude varies across different regions and cultivated crops. We used machine learning and Bayesian models to predict farm size from field size and ancillary predictors. The predictions for medium-sized and large farms (50–7,000 ha, representing 66% of the data) had mean absolute percentage errors of 40–114%, while estimates for farms <50 ha had higher errors. Farm size estimates at the landscape level (15 km diameter hexagons) were more accurate (mean absolute percentage errors of 37%) compared to the field level. The study opens future research directions towards producing spatially explicit farm size estimates from observable indicators (i.e. field size and related indicators) at scale.