Politico demonstrates the risk posed to European agricultural production by the ever-increasing reduction in the number of
As the publication states, every year thousands of farmers stop cultivating the land due to age, with far fewer young people taking their place. In the European countryside, warehouses are closing, land is being leased to ever-larger farms, and rural schools, where they exist, are closing.
The result is fewer people growing food, more imports filling supermarket shelves and an industry slowly sinking into decline.
That’s the evolving crisis the European Commission wants to tackle, with Agriculture Commissioner Christoph Hansen unveiling on Tuesday the EU Strategy for Generational Renewal in Agriculture — a plan aimed at preventing the new generation of food producers from leaving before they even start.
What do young farmers want?
Young farmers have been asking lawmakers to act for more than a decade, Peter Midendorp, the 25-year-old president of the Council of European Young Farmers (CEJA), said by phone as he hurried back from his tractor to the farm he runs with his father and siblings in the Netherlands.
Ahead of the strategy presentation, Midtendorp divides his time between the fields and Brussels. While he’s eager to see what Hansen will announce, he remains wary: “To what extent can we make all these nice proposals a reality in practice if they don’t come with funding?”
The European Commission wants member states to spend 6% of Common Agricultural Policy funds on generational renewal — double the current level. If states meet this target, CEJA could benefit from more than €17 billion in the period 2028–2034, a significant budgetary boost compared to previous years.
The question is whether this plan can actually stop the disappearance of European farms.
The difficulties of young farmers
More than a third of farm managers in Europe are over 65, while less than one in eight are under 40.
“The problem is not that young people don’t want to be farmers — it’s that it’s almost impossible to start,” said Sarah Thiel, 21, vice president of the Union of Young Farmers of Luxembourg (LLJ), in an interview in Brussels last week.
New farmers find it difficult to find available and affordable land to get started. A hectare of arable land in the EU costs almost 12,000 euros. In the Netherlands, Mindedorp’s home country, the price averages over €90,000, up from €56,000 a decade ago.
“When you start out, the banks ask for guarantees that your parents can’t give — it’s a vicious cycle,” said Florian Poncelet, 29, a cattle farmer and president of the FJA regional association of young farmers in Belgium.
Roy Meyer, president of the Dutch association of young farmers NAJK, put it bluntly: “Banks see young farmers as a risk. If you’re 25 and want to buy land, forget it.”
Across Europe, young farmers sound more impatient than nostalgic. They see agriculture not as a tradition to be protected, but as a business to be reinvented.
“Young farmers don’t expect subsidies,” Meyer said, rejecting the idea that they are looking for easy money from Brussels. “What they want is predictability — rules that don’t change with every new reform and recognition that they’re entrepreneurs like everyone else.”
“People my age are not afraid of innovation,” he added. “We want to use drones, data, artificial intelligence. But to invest, we need clear, long-term rules. You can’t build a business on ever-changing ground.”
Raising the bar
Brussels has been trying for decades to attract young farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with mixed results. Currently, Member States allocate around 3% of EU agricultural funds to young farmers’ schemes — that’s around €6.8 billion for the period 2023–2027.
Now, Agriculture Commissioner Christoph Hansen wants to raise the bar. According to a draft of the strategy presented by Politico, the goal is to double the proportion of European farmers under 40 to almost 25% by 2040.
To achieve this, the European Commission is proposing that member states allocate 6% of CAP budgets to young farmers, limit payments to pensioners and offer loans of up to €300,000 to young people entering the agricultural sector. At the same time, he is calling on national governments to use tax reform and land management policies to make farming more attractive, while announcing the publication of a European bioeconomy strategy next month.
Young farmers’ organizations, however, worry that ambitions are outstripping potential. Unlike the current CAP budget, which imposes a minimum of 3%, the new target of 6% is merely indicative.
This raises fears, as CEJA points out, that some governments may allocate even less funds.
Competition with other funding priorities
Young farmers also fear that generation renewal will find itself competing with other funding priorities and that the success of the strategy will depend less on good intentions and more on the new CAP reform, which is already under fire from both farming lobbies and MEPs.
Commission officials are responding to criticism by pointing out that young farmers will have access to multiple sources of funding through the next CAP’s new “starter package” and the generational renewal strategy. At the same time, the restructuring of the CAP payments is being considered, in order to transfer resources from the large producers to the smaller and younger ones.
Still, Peter Middendorp insists: “The fact that no specific funds are earmarked for young farmers is a message in itself,” he said. “We have a commissioner who presents himself as a ‘commissioner for young farmers’ but who proposes a CAP without any special provision for them.”
