Measuring the income of French farms: A 15-year comparative analysis of indicators from Rica and MSA

This article presents an analysis of the indicators used to measure farm income in France. While the chart of accounts defines the precise method of calculation of various intermediate management balances (including the gross added value, the gross operating surplus and the farm income), the statistical sources used to discuss the question of the level of 'income' of French farmers are diverse and the indicators used are not always homogeneous. This sometimes results in a fragility in the public expression on “farmers' income”. By matching two distinct sources of information over fifteen years (2003 to 2017), namely the Farm Accounting Data Network (Rica) produced by the Ministry of Agriculture and the database for self-employed contributors (COTNS) of the Caisse Centrale de la Mutualité Sociale Agricole (MSA), this article compares the level of several of these indicators. The matching was carried out using the SIRET number of the farms and methodological work was carried out so that the scope of the farms is common to both databases. It is thus highlighted that the 'agricultural profit' (from the MSA) is, on average, one third lower than the current result before tax (from the Rica), and that the amount of private withdrawals is weakly correlated to the accounting result or agricultural profit. Finally, a more specific analysis of ‘low incomes’ shows that, while the frequency of occurrence of such events obviously depends on the threshold chosen, the years 2009 and 2016 were particularly bad and cannot be considered representative of the average situation observed over the entire studied period.