Testing the rent review system: report

Appendix 5 – Fixed Cost Data

Notes

Data supplied is not weighted or indexed.

RESAS data published online is weighed and the previous year's RPI indexed.

Monetary data in Table 1 is gross of depreciation.

Table 2 displays the relevant separate depreciation costs - machinery at 20% and land and buildings at 10%.

Tables 1a and 2a are on a per hectare basis.

The data supplied as per hectare number is based on the Total Agricultural Area of the farm.

Total crops and grass plus rough grazing equals Total Agricultural Area.

Additional Points

Allocating fixed costs on a flat per hectare data can lead to vague or imprecise results. It does not take into account the interactions between factors such as machinery, capital, land, effort and efficiency on individual farms.

Scale will also affect the per hectare data.

The MIN MAX MEAN statistics of the agricultural area are included as an indication of the variation of farm area in Table 3.

The FBS results are obtained from a sample of around 500 farms. These are stratified by farm type, and size. The survey does not currently include farms predominantly engaged in horticulture, poultry, egg production or pig production.

The coverage of the survey is restricted to those farms which have considerable economic activity (at least 25,000 Euros of output) and are not considered as spare-time farms (have a Standard Labour Requirement SLR) of more than 0.5).

Around 12,000 holdings are represented at present.