The development of agriculture in Germany

1. Introduction

This analysis was done for WDR’s story on Quarks.de on the development of agriculture in Germany. It is a first pilot to introduce data-driven analyses and storytelling for one of Germany’s most prestigious science journalism formats.

This notebook documents the underlying data gathering and analysis process. It has been produced by Studio NAND together with ... and ... of quarks.de

1.1. Technical Setup

pip install altair==2.3.0 xlrd==1.2.0

4.7s

Python + Altair (Bash)

2. Analysis

2.1. Farms

The statistical surveys have used different bins over the years to report numbers of farms and total space used over the years. These bins have been manually unified. A few errors in the Excel file were corrected manually. This was the case for some totals (minor inconsistencies). Also inconsistent were the use of number formatting and actual numerical values included in the table. Some cells contain absolute values and use Excel’s number format to display 1000s ha, others contain the 1000s ha as the value itself.

This is the Excel file resulting from the manual processing in a Google Sheet.

Data.xlsx

We are using Pandas to transform this table from wide to long format for better compatibility with Altair and Tableau.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel(Data.xlsx
, 'Betriebe')

# ‘un-pivot’ data (wide to long format)
df = pd.melt(df, ('Betriebsgröße', 'Typ', 'Land'), var_name='Jahr', value_name='Wert')

df['Jahr'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Jahr'], format='%Y')
df['Betriebsgröße'] = df['Betriebsgröße'].str.strip()

# write the result to the file system to download
# df.to_csv('results/betriebe.csv', index=False)

# to download the df as data swap its display type to 'file'

df

1.2s

Python

import altair as alt
alt.renderers.enable('colab')

categories_order = ['weniger als 5',
                    '5 bis 10',
                    '10 bis 20',
                    '20 bis 50',
                    '50 bis 100',
                    '100 und mehr']

def show(df):
	return alt.Chart(df).mark_area().encode(
    	x=alt.X('Jahr:T'),
    	y=alt.Y("Wert:Q"),
	    color=alt.Color(
        'Betriebsgröße:N',
        sort=categories_order
      )
	)

0.4s

Python

2.1.1. Total farm land by size

2.1.1.1. Federal Republic of Germany

size_frd = df[(df['Typ'] == 'Fläche der Betriebe in 1 000 ha') &
              (df['Land'] == 'Früheres Bundesgebiet')]

show(size_frd.sort_values(by='Betriebsgröße'))

0.7s

Python

2.1.1.2. Former German Democratic Republic

Agriculture in the former GDR was centrally organized through large cooperatives owned by the state. This almost completely eradicated small, privately run farms which is immediately apparent in the first statistical surveys of farm sizes after the German reunification.

size_gdr = df[(df['Typ'] == 'Fläche der Betriebe in 1 000 ha') &
              (df['Land'] == 'Neue Länder')]

show(size_gdr)

0.7s

Python

2.2. Number of farms by size

Looking at the number of farms in each size group, we can observe a trend across Germany: the general decline of farms. This is likely the result from increasing economic pressure on farmers to produce more goods at lower prices.

2.2.1. Federal Republic of Germany

count_fdr = df[(df['Typ'] == 'Zahl der Betriebe') &
              (df['Land'] == 'Früheres Bundesgebiet')]

show(count_fdr)

0.7s

Python

2.2.2. Former German Democratic Republic

count_gdr = df[(df['Typ'] == 'Zahl der Betriebe') &
              (df['Land'] == 'Neue Länder')]

show(count_gdr)

0.6s

Python

The development of agriculture in Germany

1. Introduction

1.1. Technical Setup

2. Analysis

2.1. Farms

2.1.1. Total farm land by size

2.1.1.1. Federal Republic of Germany

2.1.1.2. Former German Democratic Republic

2.2. Number of farms by size

2.2.1. Federal Republic of Germany

2.2.2. Former German Democratic Republic

3. Agricultural usage by size