Are the Agricultural Censuses for each territory 100% samples?
A. In Scotland the annual June census covers the 50,000 agricultural holdings with sampling of smaller holdings. The smallest spatial unit for which data are made available are parishes (subject to disclosure restrictions). Note however that the EDINA agcensus service does not distribute data at the parish level. Since the late 1990s the agricultural census in England and in Wales has been conducted as a sample survey (postal questionnaire or via internet), in which data is only sought from a proportion of holdings in each year. For England a completely random sample of the 200,000 agricultural holdings would be inefficient due to the large number of small holdings thus a stratified random sampling approach was been employed in which holdings are divided into groups on the basis of theoretical labour requirement with higher sampling rates being used in the larger strata. Simply stratifying on labour requirements would however lead to low precision for some crops thus DEFRA employ a sep
