With Europe’s Farm Workforce Going Missing, Everything Counts

Europe’s agricultural workforce is shrinking faster than any policy response has so far managed to offset.

A new Nature Sustainability study models cropland availability to 2100. Its finding: it is the workforce—not the land—that increasingly limits how much agriculture can grow worldwide.

Globally, the numbers mostly hold up in aggregate, but the constraint lands unevenly, and Europe is among the hardest-hit regions:

• Western Europe faces a chronic shortfall from the 2030s.
• Eastern Europe faces a deficit for the whole century.
• The EU27’s share of global cropland potential is projected to shrink to just 3.3% by 2100, compared with 15–18% for the G7—which is actually gaining share—and roughly a quarter for BRICS.

Europe’s ageing agricultural workforce

The European Commission’s own data shows why:

• The average age of EU farm managers rose from 55 to 57 in a decade.
• Barely one in ten farms is run by someone under 40.
• Just 31% of agricultural workers are under 40, one of the lowest shares of any EU sector.
• On current trends, the EU could lose another 6.4 million farms by 2040.

This stark reading is compounded by an input crunch: nitrogen fertiliser prices are approximately 71% above 2024 levels, soil fertility is delivering diminishing returns, and the pesticide toolbox is thinning.

Making every input count

This is the gap plant biostimulants and organic fertilising products help close—not as a magic bullet, but as resilience infrastructure. They can support better nutrient-use efficiency, greater resistance to heat and drought, and less dependence on inputs Europe does not control.

The Green Deal sets the direction. The Fertilising Products Regulation gives these products a route to market. Strategic autonomy—the EU’s broader goal of reducing dependence on imported inputs and external suppliers—gives them their geopolitical logic.

That is not a sustainability footnote. These are strategic assets.

None of these tools works alone:

• Biostimulants and organic fertilisers improve nutrient efficiency.
• Low-risk pesticides and biocontrols protect yields with a lighter footprint.
• Drones and digital agriculture put inputs exactly where they are needed—not a hectare more.

With the generation that built modern European farming disappearing from the fields, this is not a nice-to-have. It is how everything that remains has to count.

Read the referenced Nature Sustainability study

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