Agricultural statistics reports (FOI)

Request

Please can you provide Agricultural Statistics Reports (ASR) for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021.

It appears that the last available online information is still dated 2018 and the current "publication release schedule (Statistics Jersey)" schedules for 2022 and 2023 do not reference the ASR. The current advice from three previous similar FOI requests was that 2019 & 2020 reports would be available online by Q1 2021, but nothing is yet on the gov.je website.

Response

Agriculture Statistics Reports (ASR) for 2019, 2020 and 2021 are not yet available. 

Publication of these reports had been delayed for a number of reasons:

• Data integrity – analysis of data for 2019 and 2020 highlighted a number of areas of inconsistency and data requires further work before publication
• Staff resource – impact of the pandemic and Brexit have required re-prioritisation of staff resource and publication of statistics has not been prioritised
• Commercial confidentiality – the publication of crop and production values has been questioned by some stakeholders, due to potential impacts on commercial confidentiality, requiring a new approach to be developed on the release of data.

The publication of the ASR has therefore been suspended during the development of a new Economic Framework for the Rural Environment – which received approval by the Council of Ministers in April 2022 and can be viewed here: 

Economic Framework for the Rural Environment (gov.je)

The new framework contains policy components (LE1a Land Management Data Platform) and (LE1c Land Use – Approved Agricultural Businesses) which will be used to deliver a revised format for published agricultural statistics.

The revised format 2019, 2020 and 2021 ASR will be published on www.gov.je in Q4 2022 and will contain data on land use (crops), livestock quantities and measures of environmental performance (as recorded by independent audit under the LEAF Marque Scheme.