Agriculture produces vegetable and animal foodstuffs. Typical activities are farming and animal husbandry, grassland cultivation and the raising of specialised crops (for instance, fruits, vegetables and wine). In spite of its small 1% share or so of total economic output, agricultural production is very important as it enables the population to be supplied with a sufficiently large amount of foodstuffs at affordable prices. More than 80% of the required foodstuffs can be obtained from domestic production.
Farmers in Germany sowed winter grain on 5.52 million hectares of arable land in autumn 2011. As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the size of the area sown for the 2012 harvest was by some 172,000 hectares or a good 3% larger than in 2011.
