Pakistan’s farms are multiplying, shrinking, and breaking into scattered pieces at a pace never recorded before. That is the central finding of the 7th Agricultural Census 2024, the country’s first fully integrated digital count of agriculture, livestock, and farm machinery, conducted by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
The census counted 11.10 million farms across the country, up 34 percent from 8.26 million in 2010. But the land those farms sit on grew by only 12 percent, to 59.30 million acres. The result is simple arithmetic with serious consequences. The average Pakistani farm has shrunk 17 percent in fourteen years, from 6.4 acres to just 5.3 acres.
The more alarming trend is what is happening within those farms. The number of fragmented farms, meaning holdings split into separate parcels surrounded by other people’s land, jumped 76 percent to 4.98 million. Nearly 45 percent of all farms in Pakistan are now fragmented.
The severity of the splintering has deepened as well. In 2010, a fragmented farm was divided into an average of three pieces. By 2024, that figure had more than doubled to seven pieces, an increase of 133 percent. Nationally, the census counted 34.4 million separate land parcels.
The problem is worst in Balochistan, where a fragmented farm is broken into 12 pieces on average, followed by Punjab at eight, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at seven, and Sindh at four. Fragmentation of this scale raises costs for farmers, wastes water and fuel moving between plots, and makes mechanized farming far harder on land that is already small.
The size distribution confirms how tight things have become. Nearly six out of every ten farms in the country, about 6.55 million holdings, are smaller than 2.5 acres, yet together they occupy barely 17 percent of total farm area. At the other end, farms of 25 acres and above make up just 1.4 percent of all farms but control roughly 15 percent of the land.
The census also documents a structural shift in who works the land. Owner operated farms surged 46 percent to 9.81 million and now make up 88 percent of all farms. Pure tenant farms fell 17 percent to 765,000, while farms run by cultivators who both own and rent land dropped 13 percent to 524,000.
Tenant operated area shrank 12 percent to 9.10 million acres. Within that, leasing has overtaken sharecropping as the dominant arrangement, accounting for 57 percent of tenant operated land against 39 percent under crop sharing.
There is an irony in the data. Tenant farms actually work the land harder than owners do. Land use intensity on tenant farms stands at 98 percent against 95 percent for owner farms, and their cropping intensity of 163 percent also beats the 155 percent recorded on owner farms.
Compared with the last Livestock Census in 2006, Pakistan’s animal populations have exploded. Goats are now the country’s largest herd at 95.83 million, up 78 percent. Cattle rose 89 percent to 55.86 million, buffaloes climbed 75 percent to 47.74 million, and sheep grew 68 percent to 44.58 million.
The dairy numbers are even more striking. In milk cows more than doubled, rising 140 percent to 20.93 million, while in milk buffaloes rose 111 percent to 21.56 million. Camels increased 64 percent to 1.51 million, and mules jumped 90 percent.
The geography of livestock follows familiar lines. Punjab leads in cattle, buffaloes, and goats, while Balochistan dominates in sheep, holding 42 percent of the national flock, and camels, with 51 percent. Livestock now contributes 63.6 percent of agricultural value added and nearly 15 percent of national GDP, well ahead of crops at 32.6 percent.
Mechanization has accelerated sharply. Pakistan now has 986,998 tractors, up 146 percent from 401,663 in the 2004 machinery census. Punjab alone holds 78.8 percent of them. The most dramatic growth came in Balochistan, where tractor numbers rose 564 percent.
Massey Ferguson dominates the market with 519,653 units, more than half the national fleet, followed by Fiat at 343,669. Implement ownership has grown even faster in some categories. Rotavators rose 279 percent and chisel ploughs jumped 837 percent since 2004.
But the census reveals that Pakistan’s mechanization increasingly runs on rentals. Farmers rented nearly as many cultivators, 937,742, as the 966,547 that were privately owned. For rotavators, rentals outnumbered owned units by more than two and a half to one. For small fragmented farms, hiring machinery by the hour has clearly become the only economical path to modern equipment.
Perhaps the most dramatic single shift in the entire census is underground. Tubewells and lift pumps nearly doubled to 1.83 million, up 97 percent since 2004, a rise the census itself calls a record increase since independence.
Solar power, which did not even register in the 2004 count, now runs 959,865 of these units, making it the single largest power source for irrigation in Pakistan at 52 percent of the total. Diesel powered units fell 36 percent to 530,500 as fuel costs pushed farmers toward the sun, while electric units rose 320 percent to 407,887.
Submersible pumps grew an extraordinary 2,316 percent to 270,989 units, and turbine tubewells rose 977 percent, both signs that farmers are chasing water at greater depths. In Balochistan, where groundwater stress is most acute, tubewell numbers rose 623 percent to 151,394.
The land itself is being worked harder than ever. Cultivated area rose 24 percent to 52.79 million acres while uncultivated farmland fell 37 percent. Land use intensity climbed from 83 percent to 95 percent, and total cropped area expanded 22 percent to 82.77 million acres.
Wheat remains king, occupying 43 percent of all cropped area at 35.82 million acres, up 27 percent since 2010. Maize was the fastest growing major crop, surging 76 percent to 4.20 million acres, while orchard area expanded 42 percent. Rice rose 15 percent to 10.71 million acres.
The one major casualty is cotton. Area under the crop collapsed 29 percent to 6.51 million acres, confirming through hard census data the long slide of what was once Pakistan’s flagship cash crop. Tunnel farming, meanwhile, is emerging as a niche but real trend, with 58,626 farms reporting greenhouse technology on 277,283 acres.
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