Organic cultivation is carried out on one tenth of the German agricultural area for vegetables in the open ground. This was reported by the 'Agrarmarkt Informations-Gesellschaft' (AMI). The figures are from the German Bureau for Statistics.
The area for organic vegetables increased by 15 percent in the last year and is now at 12,400 hectares. Carrot and root vegetables made up around 30 percent of the cultivation. Leafy and stalk vegetables made up around a quarter of cultivation, in which asparagus grew on more areas. This was followed by legumes, fleshy vegetables such as pumpkin and cabbages with the largest share of the total area. Despite unfavourable weather conditions, organic growers in 2016 attained a record harvest of 283,879 tonnes in 2016.
Looking at individual states, Nordrhein-Westfalen has the largest organic vegetable area, followed closely by Bayern. Lower Saxony and Rheinland-Pfalz are in third and fourth place. When looking at the organic share of the total vegetable area in the open ground, Saxony is at the top with an organic share of 28 percent, followed by Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
A decrease for the organic vegetable area was reported by the Bureau for Statistics for Brandenburg, Schlewig-Holstein and Thüringen. In total 1,138 organic vegetable cultivation companies were counted during the agricultural structure research. With an average area of 11 hectares they are considerably smaller than conventional colleagues with 19 hectares.