Tare land in Flemish horticulture

The annual agricultural census in Belgium delivers quantitative data of net and additional areas of land used for agriculture and horticulture. We introduce the term ‘tare land’ to indicate the latter as the area of land fragments not directly supporting crops or fodder, at farm level or at higher (landscape, region) level. For spatial planning and zoning purposes data on gross agricultural area (being the sum of net and tare areas) are required. However, the quality of the tare data is not documented or even questioned. In Belgian and international scientific and grey literature, little information on tare is available. In this paper we define two classes of tare, functional tare (fTare) and plan tare (pTare). fTare encompasses the sum of the area of all additional land used by farmers for professional purpose or closely associated to the net agricultural area but not directly used for the production of food, fodder or industrial crops. Plan tare (pTare) is defined as these parts of the statutory agricultural area not specifically used in farming, such as public roads and inclusions of non-farming buildings. By means of a GPS-survey and interviews with farm managers, we used two methods to survey net and tare areas of land. On one hand we surveyed the land within farm enterprises: 3 open air horticultural farms, 6 greenhouse horticultural farms and one mixed farm (open air horticulture and greenhouse). On the other hand we surveyed 10 segments of 25 ha, all situated in one municipality within a major horticultural region of Flanders (northern region of Belgium). fTare areas account on average for 21% of the total farm area in the case of open air horticulture whereas the fTare area is 39% in case of greenhouse horticultural farms. These averages are significantly different. The mixed farm had an fTare area of 32%. Within areas designated for agriculture plan tare is 44%. Hence only 56% of the land with an agricultural destination is effectively used for agriculture. These figures illustrate the spatial importance of tare areas and the spatially extremely scattered organisation of horticulture in the study area. Knowledge on quality and nature of tare areas is important for multi-objective spatial planning in which economic and ecological sustainability of agriculture is considered.