Family Farming Knowledge Platform

Reducing food loss on the farm

This document presents the results of the EIP AGRI Focus Group (FG) ‘Reducing food loss on the farm’, identifying the principal on-farm practices and technologies that can minimise such losses. Addressing these losses is a major societal challenge and forms a key pillar of the UN’s Strategic Development Goals (SDGs). While in Western societies, most of the documented food losses/wastes occur post-farm gate, relatively little attention has been paid to on-farm (pre-farm gate) losses. These can be far in excess of 10% of total production and in the opinion of this FG, arise for a range of reasons such as inefficient farming operations, difficulties with fulfilling production contracts and lack of awareness and consequently inadequate reporting (categorising) of such losses. There is a lack of information on the extent of these losses, as they are not readily measurable and some are ‘virtual losses’ arising from reduced yield due to inefficient operations. Consequently, the FG considers that there is a need to establish clear definitions of what constitute ‘food losses’ on the farm, and to devise and implement systems that measure and monitor these on an ongoing basis. 

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Organization: Eip Agri
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Year: 2020
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Country/ies: European Union
Geographical coverage: European Union (European Union)
Type: Report
Content language: English
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