A classification scheme based on farming practices

The core of the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which entered into force on 1 January 2023, is the CAP strategic plan, designed by each Member State (MS) according to a European legislative framework (Regulation EU 2021/2115). Within the strategic plans, Member States have designed interventions that best fit their needs and local conditions. The result is a wide range of tailor-made interventions across the European Union, with different requirements for farmers. To facilitate the reporting and the consequent evaluation and monitoring processes of the policy, there is a need to systematise the interventions in the CAP Strategic Plans (CSPs) according to the farming practices that are included in them. This report describes the classification scheme based on farming practices developed by the Joint Research Centre to report in a systematic way the interventions defined in the Member States CSPs and to enable the extraction and aggregation of similar interventions across different MS and different CAP areas. It describes the methodological steps followed to establish the classification scheme. The classification scheme covers farming practices related to climate and environment. It is structured in tiers where the farming practices are described with a higher level of details from tier 1 to tier 2 and 3 to meet the different level of detail the practices are described in the CAP strategic plans. The classification is composed of 45 tier 1 classes, 164 tier 2 classes and 157 tier 3 classes. The comprehensive character of the classification scheme encourages its use beyond its original scope of reporting CAP implementation. In fact, the classification is currently used by the DG AGRI Evaluation Help Desk for the mapping of the CAP strategic plans to allow policy analysis; it is the working tool for the collection of information from the CAP strategic plans implementation to feed the CAPRI model; it is also considered as a reference in defining some new variables related to environmental and climate in the Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN).