Almost 30% of farm managers in the 28 European Union (EU) countries are aged 65 years or more.
The figures, from the EU’s statistical book on agriculture, forestry and fishery, state that there were 12.2m farm managers in the agricultural sector of EU Member States in 2010.
Of the 12.2m farm managers in the EU 3.6m of those were aged 65 or older, which equates to almost three out of every 10 farm managers, the figures show.
The statistics also show that only 97,000 of EU farm managers are less than 25 years old.
Farm managers younger than 25 years old accounted for 0.8% of the total number of farm managers across all types of farm, the EU figures show.
Furthermore, the figures show that farm managers younger than 35 years of age represented 7.5% of all managers.
The figures, which show all 28 EU Member States, show a breakdown of farm managers in Ireland.
The EU figures show that of the 127,000 farm managers in Ireland of all ages, 8,000 of those are under the age of 35 while farm managers over 65 account for just over 32,000 of farm managers.
There are over 86,000 farm managers in Ireland between the age of 35 and 64, the figures show.
Romania has the highest concentration of farm managers with over 3.8m in the region while Luxembourg had the lowest amount of farm managers with 1.9m.