County data in FBS data builder

Where possible we try to present results for counties by type-of-farm - although sometimes there are insufficient farms in the sample to do this.

This because there are just over 1,750 farms in the whole survey in England (and 500 in Wales), and in fbs data builder there are 28 distinct 'county' (at NUTS3) classifications. In addition we have 14 distinct farm types. This gives 392 cells in a table for 'FarmType * County'. Or 4.5 sample farms for an average cell of the table - which is too few for a reliable estimate. Reliable estimates for such samples will be mostly unavailable because the confidence intervals (plus or minus the SE*1.96, for 95%) increase as the sample gets smaller, so the confidence intervals will be far too big, in such cases.

Because users are often motivated, despite the limitations of the sample and specific advise from us, to frequently request 'county*farm type' - instead of choosing a bigger geography like GORs or NUTS-2 Regions - and so very often getting no data at all, as well as an unfavourable impression of our service - we do not encourage the option to choose the dimension 'County'.

However, as you will see below some data is available, if the queries are appropriately structured. We hope that this will meet the needs of most users who are interested in data about farming in a particular county. You are welcome to contact us, if you feel there should be county data available for your particular query, but please take note that the data is very limited and mostly has relatively large confidence intervals.