How much land in the UK is used for agricultural purposes?

Question

How much land in the UK is used for agricultural purposes?

Answer 1

This is 2005 data.

Land in grass and bare fallow- 7,004,000 hectares

Grazing and other land- 6,462,000 hectares

Crops-4,443,000 hectares

Set-aside land- 559,000 hectares

Total- 18,508,000 hectares

Answer 2

A lot !

Answer 3

See first link below for source.  John H's figures are the last column of this.  You may also want to know that the total area of land in the UK is 24 million ha, giving around 70% as "agricultural land use".  (It's 100 ha to a square kilometre, and about 2.56 sq km to a square mile.)

The second link (near foot of page) gives the 2002 figures broken down a bit more.

To get the amount of land farmed you need to take out some of the figures -- "other land and woodland", and "set-aside" (this is land not currently farmed).  Bear in mind that rough grazing is in agricultural use, but not ever ploughed.  Depends exactly what you want.

Note also that the "woodland" is woodland on farms -- there's lots more woodland on other land.

I don't think the figures include all rough grazing.  They are derived from agricultural census figures, and these do not necessarily include common grazing (grazing on common land such as mountains) -- they are land within farm holdings, or claimed as used by a holding.  For example, the New Forest, which my cattle graze, does not go on my agricultural census form nor fully on my SPS application.  I think that's why the "common rough grazing" figure seems small.  Can't find a better one though.  It's similar to the total registered common land, but there are no figures for unregistered common land in either Scotland or Wales, where most of the mountain land is (search for "unregistered" in third and fourth links).