Three Quarters of Irish Farm Output Comes From Animals

What a farm sells

Agricultural output is mostly two things: crops, and animals with the products that come from them. The remainder, close to a twentieth of the Union total, is agricultural services, so the two do not sum to the whole. The balance between them describes what a country's farming is for.

Across the EU in 2025, animal goods accounted for 44.4% of agricultural output by value. Slightly less than half.

The national figures run from 75.7% to 23.4%, and the ordering is close to a map.

The grass economies

Ireland records 75.7%, the highest in the Union. Cyprus is second and is a case of its own, taken below; after it come Denmark at 63.0%, Luxembourg at 61.1%, Malta at 58.3%, Belgium at 58.2%, Finland at 54.4% and Estonia at 54.2%.

Ireland is the clearest case. It has high rainfall, mild winters and a long grass-growing season, and comparatively little land suited to arable crops at scale. Grass supports cattle and sheep, and cattle and sheep are what Irish agriculture largely produces.

Cyprus at 64.6% is the exception to the geography, and its position rests on a small total output — 885 million euro — in which intensive livestock is a large share of a small number.

The sun economies

Greece records 23.4%, the lowest in the Union. Bulgaria follows at 26.3%, Romania at 28.9% and Italy at 35.8%.

Greek agriculture is olives, fruit, vegetables and wine — crops that need sunshine and tolerate dry summers, and that generate high value per hectare without livestock. Portugal at 37.0% and Croatia at 37.7% sit in the same band. Slovakia at 36.5% and Lithuania at 37.4% sit in it without the climate: this study offers no account of either.

Why this is a climate ranking

Almost every Member State above 50% has cool summers, reliable rainfall and a short or unreliable arable season. Most Member States below 40% have hot dry summers and land suited to permanent crops; Lithuania and Slovakia, as above, do not.

That is a stronger regularity than most rankings on this site produce, and it has an obvious cause: farming is one of the few economic activities whose output mix is directly constrained by weather. A Greek farmer cannot easily choose to run a dairy herd on Greek rainfall, and an Irish farmer cannot grow olives.

Wealth and climate cannot be told apart here. Across the Union the animal share and GDP per head line up, high with high and low with low, a correspondence derived here from the two series, each for a single year. But in Europe wealth and growing season are not independent of one another, so the two point the same way here and a ranking of twenty-seven countries cannot separate them. The departures are large and run both ways — Estonia is below the EU level on GDP per head and sits near the top of this ranking, the Netherlands is far above it and sits below the EU animal share, Italy is above Estonia and sits near the bottom.

What follows from the split

The two halves of European agriculture face different risks and different policy. Livestock systems are exposed to feed costs, animal disease and emissions rules; crop systems are exposed to drought, frost at the wrong moment and the price of a small number of commodities.

An EU-wide agricultural policy is therefore acting on two sectors that share a name and little else, and the 44.4% average describes neither of them.