Agricultural blocks

Farm block is a data set containing information on maximum eligible agricultural land as defined by the EU. The agricultural blocks are used by the Board of Agriculture to administer aid to farmers, for example to check the area data in farmers’ applications and to inform farmers of the applicable data. The data set does not contain all agricultural land in Sweden, but only the parts that a farmer has applied for support for at some point. A block is a polygon/surface that delimits an area of agricultural land. A block is bounded by fixed boundaries. Examples of fixed boundaries are roads, stone walls, forests and buildings. A block can also be delimited by regional boundaries (parish boundaries from 2000). A block must, with few exceptions, be at least 0.1 hectares. On a block, only one farmer can have agricultural land (except for grazing land that is co-grazed). The agricultural blocks data set contains approximately 1,143,000 blocks. Of these, about 891,000 are arable land blocks and about 252,000 are pasture land blocks. The total area is 3.2 million hectares, of which 2.7 million hectares are arable land and 510 000 hectares are pasture. The average area of arable land blocks is 3.03 ha and that of pasture blocks is 2.03 ha.