The average power of the 11,580 farm tractors registered in the UK last year was 168.4hp, reports the AEA. While slightly higher than the previous year (166.3hp) the number (Figure 1) was below the record high of exactly 171hp in 2020.
Figure 1
Looking at individual power bands (Figure 2), the main decline in registrations was for machines below 140hp, for which 13% fewer tractors were recorded in 2022 than in the previous year. Above 140hp, registrations increased, compared with 2021, although there was a decline for the largest tractors, those over 260hp, which account for a little over 6.0% of total registrations.
Figure 2
Registrations declined in most English regions (Figure 3), except for the Home Counties (including London), Yorkshire and the Humber and west Midlands. The three regions with the highest number of registrations – the south west, east of England and north west – all recorded year-on-year declines between 2021 and 2022, though, while the sharpest fall was in the south east.
Figure 3
Scotland and Wales also saw lower registrations in the latest year but there slightly more machines recorded in Northern Ireland than in the previous year. The latter was a result of a big increase in the final quarter of the year, a period during which UK-wide registrations were more than 5.0% higher than in the equivalent period of 2021, reversing the trend seen earlier in the year.
A couple of weeks ago, we published AEA figures for UK tractor registrations in 2022, which showed a 4.0% year-on-year decrease, to 11,580 machines.
