The values shown on the map always come from an identified public source or from an explicit calculation based on public sources. No data is supplemented with proprietary estimates, unverifiable models, or statistical inferences without a stated formula. This page reports every transformation step, the coefficients used, the methodological choices made, and the limits that follow from them.
Design choices and known limits
MapTheFood uses, in parallel, sources that answer different questions. It does not combine them into a single figure. This is a deliberate choice, not a technical limitation.
Separate sources, never merged. The BDN (National Livestock Database) counts farms and animals, E-PRTR (European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register) collects emission declarations by activity and pollutant, the IED register administratively identifies installations subject to the Directive, and AGEA counts CAP beneficiaries and amounts: different units and scopes for distinct informational levels. Adding them together or treating them as automatically coincident would produce a figure that looks precise but has no methodological basis. The sources are shown as separate layers on the same map, with the source and granularity explicitly indicated in each view.
E-PRTR and IED scope. In the E-PRTR reporting flow, intensive pig and poultry farms report in Annex I sector 7 (codes 7(a) and its subdivisions); in the IED administrative register, livestock installations are identified by native codes 6.6(a), 6.6(b) and 6.6(c). The two sets do not fully coincide. The Plants, Greenhouse Gases and Inspections views retain the native IED scope. The NH₃ Emissions view explicitly compares the IED scope — 701 declarants among 1,242 plants — with all 764 E-PRTR sector 7 declarations. The 63 additional declarants are shown with a dashed halo and are not interpreted as evidence of a plant's permitting status.
Livestock scope. The thresholds considered are more than 2,000 production places for pigs, more than 750 places for sows and more than 40,000 places for poultry. The European Commission's 2022 proposal envisaged thresholds applicable to cattle farms too; those thresholds were not retained in the approved text of Directive (EU) 2024/1785. To describe the territorial distribution of the cattle sector in Italy, MapTheFood separately uses aggregated BDN data on farms and animal numbers. This data does not replace E-PRTR environmental declarations and carries the limits documented on the Open data page.
CAP by municipality, province and region, not per farm. The AGEA data used (EAGF/EAFRD transparency register, 2025) is originally aggregated by municipality: a payment cannot be linked to a specific plant without the CUAA, which is not included in the publication. The municipal view uses proportional bubbles; provincial and regional views sum the same published municipalities and use choropleths with five national classes that remain fixed under filtering. Amounts are absolute, not normalised by area, holdings or population. Municipalities with fewer than 5 beneficiaries are excluded under AGEA's confidentiality threshold. This is a different, broader register than AGEA's Payments Dashboard. A freedom-of-information request has been submitted to AGEA for farm-level data.
CAP Concentration: a separate, beneficiary-level dataset. The CAP Concentration view does not use the 2025 AGEA register aggregated by municipality, but a separate file of the FEAGA transparency register, financial year 2024, kept at the level of the individual beneficiary (identified by tax code or VAT number, never by name) in order to calculate the Gini index and the Lorenz curve. FEASR is not included in this calculation: the public file only covers part of it, as explained on the Open data page. The Gini index is calculated with the standard formula based on the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of perfect equidistribution; the curve is built on 20 percentile points of beneficiaries ranked by increasing amount.
CAP & NH₃ Emissions view. The combined view applies the same regional, provincial and municipal CAP selector used in CAP Payments 2025: choropleths at the first two levels and proportional bubbles at the third. Native-IED-scope plants reporting NH₃ remain individual points at every level. The ranking geographically aggregates plant counts and declared amounts for the selected territory; it does not link payments to plants, identify beneficiaries or imply a causal relationship between the variables.
Non-uniform reference years. The sources used for Italy have different reference dates: E-PRTR plants 2024, BDN 31 December 2025, CAP year 2025. Overlaps between these sources describe the territorial distribution of the variables, but do not constitute a precise point-in-time comparison or a time series. The date of each source is shown on the Open data page and in the source panel of each view on the map.
BDN privacy threshold and published totals. To reduce the risk that operators in small municipalities can be indirectly identified, MapTheFood does not publish municipality-by-species cells with fewer than 5 farms. The national totals shown in analyses may therefore differ from the sum of the municipalities visible on the map. A further distinction is required between establishments and activities: one establishment may contain more than one registered activity, so the two totals are not interchangeable. The source file, threshold and unit used are stated with each view.
Known limits in the BDN dataset. The public BDN file reports 2 aquaculture farms nationwide, a figure markedly lower than those reported by FEAP (the Federation of European Aquaculture Producers) and ISPRA (the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research). Aquaculture data is not used in estimates or rankings. The discrepancy has been reported to the EEA as part of the national dataset's verification process.
Slaughter by province: an official figure, not an elaboration. This view publishes directly the table of animals slaughtered by province and species from the Sistema Informativo Veterinario (vetinfo.it): unlike the other BDN views, it applies no normalisation or index of its own. Categories follow the source's aggregation, which cannot be broken down further: Cattle and Buffalo are a single entry, and Pigs include wild boar slaughtered at the plant. The figure measures where the slaughtering plant is located, not where the animal was farmed nor where the meat will be consumed: a province with no recorded slaughter for a species may still host farms of that species, simply without an authorised abattoir on its own territory.
Municipal UAA and the time gap with BDN data. The Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA) and Total Agricultural Area (TAA) by municipality, used to normalise animal numbers against farmed land, come from ISTAT's 7th General Census of Agriculture, with 2020 as the reference year (IstatData database, table "Agricultural units and area by altitude zone"). It is the most recent decennial census: the next one has not yet been carried out, so no more up-to-date municipal UAA figure exists. Comparing 2020 UAA with 2025 BDN animal numbers involves a 5-year gap, during which a municipality's agricultural area may have changed; for this reason the animals/ha of UAA indicator should be read as an estimate, not a precise measurement. Sardinian municipal codes, redefined by the provincial reform in force from 2026 (Regional Law 7/2021), have been realigned to the codes in use at the time of the census using ISTAT's official correspondence table (List of Italian municipalities, updated 21/02/2026). UAA is available for 7,868 of 7,894 municipalities (99.7%): missing are a small number of small municipalities below the census's statistical confidentiality threshold, and some municipalities created by mergers after 2020, whose UAA was still distributed across the pre-existing municipalities at the time of the survey.
Key terms
Definitions of the technical terms used in MapTheFood's interface and documentation.
Grouping by supply-chain stage
Views are grouped by the phenomenon observed rather than by broad thematic similarity.
Farms remains the BDN block for animal presence and density. Slaughter and logistics covers the place of slaughter. Market and consumption contains only sufficiently complete demand/market indicators. Supply chain and footprint covers commodity origins and links to the environmental dossier.
The former composite “Territorial concentration” view is not published because it combined farms, slaughterhouses and restaurant mapping into one index partly dependent on OpenStreetMap coverage. The OSM-based “Commercial availability” view is also excluded from consolidated views.
Slaughter by province is official vetinfo/BDN data and is not an origin-destination flow. A farm-to-slaughterhouse movement map will only be published after BDN movement data are collected and methodologically validated.
Single-species views. Cattle-only views are explicitly labelled instead of showing an irrelevant species selector.