Labour force

Annual work unit (AWU)

Annual work unit (AWU) is the full-time equivalent employment, i.e. the total hours worked divided by the average annual hours worked in full-time jobs in the country. One annual work unit corresponds to the work performed by one person who is occupied on an agricultural holding on a full-time basis.
The minimum working hours for work to be considered full-time are defined in the national rules governing contracts of employment. If these do not indicate the number of annual hours, then 1800 hours is to be taken as the minimum figure (225 working days of eight hours each).
As the volume of agricultural labour is being calculated on the basis of full-time equivalent jobs, no person can therefore represent more than one AWU. This constraint holds even if it is known that someone is working on agricultural activities for more than the number of hours defining full-time in the Member State concerned).

Full time working days

A full time working day is the normal working day of regular workers employed on a full-time basis. It is any day of such length that the worker is paid the salary or any kind of remuneration (wages, profits, or other payments including payments in kind) for a full day's work, during which the work performed is of the kind normally carried out by a full time agricultural worker.
Days of leave and sickness do not count as working days.

Area

For the purpose of IFS areas are transmitted in hectares (10.000 m²). The are (100 m²) and its multiple the hectare are part of the SI units permitted only in specialized fields (area of farmland and building land), which are defined in the Directive No 80/181/EEC on units of measurement.

Livestock

Heads of animals

The heads of animals are given on a reference day during the reference period (see 2.7.3 above).
It is known that the number of livestock in a year may fluctuate. For some animal types (e.g. poultry) there may be a period between production cycles in which the housing is empty, due to temporary breaks in the production cycle (e.g. regular sanitary cleaning of animal houses, disease outbreaks, or similar reasons) and a lower number or no livestock are on the holding.
Because IFS is a structural survey, such holdings should still be recorded to avoid illusionary fluctuations in the data. The livestock of these holdings will correspond to the number of animals just before the sanitary cleaning (provided they no longer exist in any other holding).

Livestock unit

The livestock unit, abbreviated as LSU (or sometimes as LU), is a standard measurement unit that allows the aggregation of the various categories of livestock of various species and age as per convention, via the use of specific coefficients established on the basis of the nutritional or feed requirement of each type of animal, in order to enable a comparison. The coefficients for IFS are adopted in accordance with Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2018/1091.

Table 4 – Livestock units in accordance with Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2018/1091

Type of animal	Characteristic of animal	Coefficient
Bovine animals	Less than 1 year old	0.4
	1 to less than 2 years old	0.7
	Male, 2 years old and over	1
	Heifers, 2 years old and over	0.8
	Dairy cows	1
	Non-dairy cows	0.8
Sheep and goats		0.1
Pigs	Piglets, live weight of under 20 kg	0.027
	Breeding sows, live weight 50 kg and over	0.5
	Other pigs	0.3
Poultry	Broilers	0.007
	Laying hens	0.014
	Other poultry
	Turkeys	0.03
	Ducks	0.01
	Geese	0.02
	Ostriches	0.35
	Other poultry fowls n.e.c.	0.001
Rabbits, breeding females		0.02

Table 5 – Other livestock units

Type of animal	Characteristic of animal	Coefficient
Equidae		0.8

Number of hives

For bees, the unit adopted is the number of hives.

Holdings with livestock

Holdings with livestock are agricultural holdings with bovine animals, goats , sheep , pig , poultry , rabbits, beehives or livestock n.e.c.
Holdings with livestock can have zero livestock units (LSU) as LSU is only calculated for bovine animals, goats, sheep, pigs, poultry, and female breeding rabbits. Holdings with livestock and no LSU are holdings which have beehives or livestock n.e.c.

Animal housing

In the IFS core, the number of animals present in the farm for each class is collected for a reference day.
For the module on animal housing and manure management the relevant units are the average number of animals and the number of places.

Average number of animals (for reporting purposes)

For the purpose of reporting on greenhouse gas emissions (CH₄ emissions from enteric fermentation, CH₄ emissions from manure management and N₂O emissions from manure management) a basic characterisation of livestock, gathered from official national statistics is sufficient (IPCC, 2006). The value to be used for this purpose, even for the simplest methodology (Tier 1) is the annual average population, which is calculated using the following formula:

Annual average animal population (IPCC)
Annual Average Population = Days alive * Number of animals produced annually / 365

In case of static animal populations, (e.g., dairy cows, breeding swine, layers), the annual average population will be the same as the one-time animal inventory data. But it may not be so for populations of meat animals, such as broilers, beef cattle and swine.
Broiler chickens are typically grown approximately 60 days before slaughter. Estimating the average annual population as the number of birds grown and slaughtered over the course of a year would overestimate the population, as it would assume each bird lived the equivalent of 365 days. Instead, one should estimate the average annual population as the number of animals grown divided by the number of growing cycles per year. For example, if broiler chickens are typically grown in flocks for 60 days, an operation could turn over approximately 6 flocks of chickens over the period of one year. Therefore, if the operation grew 60,000 chickens in a year, their average annual population would be 9,863 chickens. For this example the equation would be:
Annual average population = 60 days * 60,000 chickens / 365 days = 9,863 chickens

The CLRTAP methodology has a different approach to the calculation of the annual average population, by using a combination of number of places and number of empty days (EEA, 2017), but it leads to equivalent results as the calculation proposed by IPCC which is given above.

Annual average animal population (CLRTAP)
Annual Average Population = Number of places * (1 – days empty 365)

Where "days empty" is the product of the number of production cycles or rounds per year and the duration of the period during which the animal place is empty
days empty = rounds * days of empty place

A basic calculator (functioning in Word) is provided in Annex III.
Note that the average number of animals across housing types is additive.
Animals that spend part of their time grazing are also to be included in the calculation.

Number of places

The unit for assessing the dimension of animal housing is the number of places.
The term "places" is used in the sense of the stable capacity during the reference period.
The number of places in the animal house which are temporarily empty during the reference period is also recorded if they are normally occupied. For animals always outdoors "places" refers to the number of animals that could be supported in the holding (assuming a reasonable LSU/ha of pasture).

Are "places" the same of "maximum number of places occupied in the reference period"?

No. Places are to be interpreted as the stable capacity during the reference period.
However, in case such number is not possible to obtain in a simple manner Eurostat accepts that the maximum number of places occupied during the reference period, including those cases where "over-exploitation" occurs, is used as an estimate of the number of places. This should be communicated in advance as part of the ADM data transmission.

Date Time

Date and time shall follow the ISO 8601 norm. The main feature of the norm is that datetime information is ordered so that the largest temporal term (the year) is placed to the left and successive smaller terms are placed to the right of the previous term (date elements can be separated by "-" and time elements by ":" to improve human readability). The norm also fixes a reference calendar as the Gregorian calendar. The norm also prescribes as a minimum a four digit year (YYYY). Note that YYYYMM is not allowed for the representation of a month and YYYY-MM is to be used instead.

Example of a day: 2017-07-31 (YYYY-MM-DD) or 20170131 (YYYYMMDD)

Example of a month: 2017-03 (YYYY-MM) but not 201703

Example of a date with time in UTC: 2017-07-31T07:59:19+00:00

Power

In IFS2023 tractors are classified according to the kW (kilowatt) of their motor. A watt is a measure of energy. A watt is the measure of the rate of power flow. When one ampere (amp) flows through an electrical difference of one volt (V), this is equal to one watt (W) . There are one thousand watts in a kilowatt.
Another common unit of power for tractors is the horsepower (hp), the rate at which work is done, usually in reference to the output of engines or motors. There are many different standards and types of horsepower. DIN 66036 defines one metric horsepower as the power to raise a mass of 75 kilograms against the Earth's gravitational force over a distance of one metre in one second: 75 kg × 9.80665 ms2 × 1 m 1 s = 75 kgf⋅ms = 1 PS. This is equivalent to 735.49875 W, or 98.6% of an imperial mechanical horsepower.
In 1972, the PS was replaced by the kilowatt as the official power-measuring unit in EEC directives.

Table 6 – Correspondence of kW and hp

kW	hp
15	20
25	34
40	55
60	82
80	100
90	120
100	135
111	150
120	160
150	200

Expand all Collapse all

Page tree

2.9 Units of measurement