Sample survey of agriculture and forestry

Name: Sample survey of agriculture and forestry
Topic: Agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing

Division for Housing, Property, Spatial and Agricultural Statistics

Country, region or county.

Annual

Data are delivered to Eurostat by agreement.

Collected and revised data are stored securely by Statistics Norway in compliance with applicable legislation on data processing.

Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified or anonymised microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway.

The purpose of the Survey of Agriculture is to obtain relevant data not found in administrative data systems, and to obtain data for units not covered by administrative systems.

The Survey of Agriculture is designed to form a picture of the agriculture industry in Norway (the number of holdings and properties) through various questions. The questions vary from year to year (labour, liabilities, investments, fixed assets, rental of agricultural land, farm buildings, extended forest survey etc.).

Data from the survey are used by professional organizations, the Budget Committee for Agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Ministry of Environment, various research institutions such as the Norwegian Agricultural Economics Research Institute and the Division for energy, environmental and transport statistics at Statistics Norway.

No external users have access to statistics before they are released at 8 a.m. on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.

Not relevant

The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).

Not relevant

The population is based on active holdings from applications for Governmental grants and the administrative Farm Register of the Norwegian Agricultural Authority.

The majority of the data comes directly from respondents who fill out forms for the annual agricultural survey. The Agricultural Register provides information on the size of the agricultural and forest area, persons associated with the property/holding and what their association is with the property/holding.

Each year a sample is drawn for the Survey of Agriculture. The size of the sample varies between 5000 and 7000 active holdings, stratified by size and type of production in each county.

Letters are sent digitally to the holdings drawn for inclusion in the survey. The owner or holder of the property provides the data.

Editing is defined here as checking, examining and amending data. A number of controls and corrections are done to ensure consistency both on a single form and between forms and available register information.

The sample is stratified by location, size and farm type. A weight is calculted for each holding.

Not relevant

Employees of Statistics Norway have a duty of confidentiality.

Statistics Norway does not publish figures if there is a risk of the respondent’s contribution being identified. This means that, as a general rule, figures are not published if fewer than three units form the basis of a cell in a table or if the contribution of one or two respondents constitutes a very large part of the cell total.

Statistics Norway can make exceptions to the general rule if deemed necessary to meet the requirements of the EEA agreement, if the respondent is a public authority, if the respondent has consented to this, or when the information disclosed is openly accessible to the public.

More information can be found on Statistics Norway’s website under Methods in official statistics, in the ‘Confidentiality’ section.

To ensure confidentiality, the suppression method is used in these statistics.

The statistics are basically comparable back to the end of 1940th. However, for some variables there will be a break e.g. between 1998 and 1999. The reason for this is that the method used for estimating the number of holdings from 1990 to 1998 gradually led to too high figures. This was evidently shown by the results of the complete census of agriculture for 1999.

Figures for supplementary industries before 2010 are not directly comparable to more recent years. This is related to changes in the questionnaries.

In 2007, the questions related to supplementary industries was expanded. In addition to ticking off for relevant industry, the respondents were asked to fill in the corresponding gross income. This modification may have caused a somewhat higher item non-response.

Primary data are obtained from the forms filled out by the respondents. They may contain errors made by the individual respondents when he or she filled out the form. A number of errors are discovered and corrected by those who go through forms during the revision process at Statistics Norway.

A number of errors during the collection and processing of the data are unavoidable and include errors that occur during revision, data processing errors etc. Extensive work has been carried out to reduce these errors as much as possible.

Non-response in the survey is due to the failure of individual respondents to deliver questionnaires or that a property has been sold or is no longer farmed as an independent unit.

Variance: All sample surveys will be encumbered by a certain amount of uncertainty. Generally, the fewer the observations are, the more uncertain the results. Groups based on few observations will be particularly sensitive to extreme values, i.e. values that deviate considerably from the average. Such extreme values are consequently assigned a weight equal to 1, so that they only represent themselves in the material.

Bias: All types of holdings are included in the Survey of Agriculture sample. To provide a better representation in certain counties with few holdings a higher percentage of holdings are selected in these areas.

Frame errors: The quality of the register basis from which the sample is selected also has an impact on the quality of the final result.