Open ground vegetables in Germany: largest area for asparagus

Asparagus is the vegetable with the most cultivation area in Germany. This was reported by the German website Gabot.de. Since the last official research in 2008, the asparagus area has increased by 10% to almost 24,000 hectares in 2012. This means that last year asparagus took up almost one fifth of the area used for growing open ground vegetables in Germany. The largest asparagus areas were in the state of Lower Saxony with a total on 5,200 hectares of cultivation area.

After asparagus came carrots - based on growing area - with 10,100 hectares, consumption onions with 9,500 hectares and cauliflower with 4,400 hectares. In 2012, open ground vegetables were grown on almost 115,000 hectares in Germany. On the surface, this is around the same as the total surface of the states Hamburg and Bremen. Compared to 2008 the cultivation area has remained relatively constant.

Around 3.6 million tonnes of open ground vegetables were harvested. Carrots were harvested most (592,000 tonnes), followed by consumption onions (485,000 tonnes) and white cabbage (473,000 tonnes). Around 10% of the German vegetable harvested from the open ground comes from fully organic companies.