In 2019, according to the results of the State Office for Statistics of Lower Saxony (LSN), 774 agricultural enterprises in Lower Saxony cultivated vegetables on an area of 20,416 hectares, harvesting 531,139 tonnes of vegetables.
With a harvest of 137,172 tonnes, onions accounted for almost a quarter of the total harvest, although they only grew on just over an eighth of the cultivated area. This meant that the onion yield rose from 432.8 dt/ha in 2018 to 481.2 dt/ha in 2019. More than half of the onions came from the statistical region of Lüneburg, i.e. the districts north of Hanover and east of Bremen, where about half of the cultivated area was also located.
Cucumbers dominate greenhouse cultivation
The vegetable of the year 2019/2020, the cucumber, was cultivated on a much smaller scale. Vegetable farmers in Lower Saxony cultivated both pickled gherkins and salad cucumbers, but even together both types of cucumber occupied just 0.33% of the total cultivated area, in open field cultivation even only 0.14% of the cultivated area. If we look exclusively at protected cultivation in greenhouses and accessible tunnels, the cucumber was far ahead: almost two-fifths of the covered vegetable cultivation areas were used for cucumber cultivation, 37.8 hectares out of a total of 96.7 hectares.
The cucumber also produced the highest yield of all the vegetable varieties recorded in the greenhouses, 5,363 dt/ha, which is why it produced a good harvest despite the small area under cultivation: just under 20,354 t - after all, 3.6% of the total vegetable harvest. In addition, 2,197 t of pickled gherkins were harvested, so that all gherkins together accounted for about 4% of the total vegetable harvest.
25% organic share
Just under a quarter of all vegetable farms in Lower Saxony work according to the guidelines of organic farming, and about a tenth of the cultivated area and the harvest volume in Lower Saxony corresponded to these guidelines.
Source: LSN