Statistical processing

Source data

The prices of agricultural sales and purchases of goods are mainly collected on a monthly basis and are mainly based on reports from companies dealing with the producers of primary agriculture, eg. feed dealers. In addition, among other things, information from industry organizations, public authorities and listings for agriculture-specific matters.

As a price basis for various costs including energy, maintenance, services and investment goods are obtained from data from Statistics Denmark's general price statistics. Information on slaughter and export of live animals, milk weighed in on dairies, eggs weighed in on egg packaging come from administrative records.

More information can be found in the statistics documentation Slaughter animals and meat production, Milk and dairy products, Egg production. More detailed information can be found in the glossary on the final pages of Agriculture's Price Relationship.

Frequency of data collection

Data collected primarily on a weekly or monthly basis. However, there are also quarterly and annually collections. Wages and land prices are examples of yearly prices.

Data collection

The data received comes from web questionnaires upload solution and data registers and quotations.

Data validation

The incoming data is kept against historical data and current knowledge collected in the field of professional journals so that unrealistic changes in prices are detected.

Data compilation

There are absolute and indexed figures (both total index and sub-index) published for prices in agriculture. The absolute figures are not treated, ass the average of the collected figures is published without further processing. The index figures are weighted based on the gross factor income level of the individual goods in the base year 2015. Furthermore, there is a weighting of months, based on an individual assessment of the level of sales each month throughout the year 2015, which underlies the weighting of individual commodities. The weighting monthly is aggregated to quarterly weight. If a product group's sales were to change dramatically, the weighting could provide some distortion in comparison to how the individual goods real importance, and may give a distorted picture of the real world. This is inevitable, why there is a rebasing taking place each 5th year where all weights are reviewed and product groups' composition.

The starting point for weighting when calculating total and sub-indices for sales products and consumption in production are the individual product values in the calculation of Economic Accounts for Agriculture and correspondingly in the EU's Economic Accounts for Agriculture. These inventories are based on quantity price and value information from a number of sources.

The emphasis is on farmers' sales and purchases during the base year (reference period) including trade between agricultural holdings. Estimated internal turnover on agricultural holdings is included in the calculation of the indices published by elucidation of agricultural gross factor income. For investment indices, values for agricultural investment are used in the base year. However, subdivision of inventory has been estimated using other sources.

When calculating monthly indices of sales and consumption in production, it is taken into account that the purchase and sale of some products, eg cereals, fruits and vegetables, is seasonal. Where there is no or only insignificant difference in turnover months in between, the weight for the month for the product is 1/12 of the annual weight. For products with great variation throughout the year, the annual weight is distributed based on the base year's turnover of the 12 months, possibly. however, quarterly or semi-annually, depending on available information and materiality.

For indexes where prices for several individual products index an item (for example, prices for several types of cattle are included in a total price for cattle), the weighting is done by dividing the weight basis of the product into value for individual products. In some cases, information is found for the full product range, in other cases less significant products are represented through others.

Annual indexes are formed on the basis of the data that is considered to be the most accurate. Where data and volume information for the year are available from data suppliers, such data are used. In other cases, the monthly indices weighted with the monthly weights are used to calculate the annual index. When calculating partial and total indices on an annual basis, and then weighted into aggregate indices on an annual basis.

Adjustment

No corrections are made, however, weighted prices according to season's importance.