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Abstract
Climate change is altering the growing conditions for agriculture in Germany. At the very least since the drought years of 2018–2022, it has become clear that the climatic changes have consequences for water use. The results of this development are local water scarcity and restrictions on private or agricultural water use. This leads to temporal regional water use conflicts between water management and agriculture. As a result, the topic of agricultural water management has also moved up the political agenda. Due to the heterogeneity of agriculture in Germany, and the spatial differences in the factors that determine irrigation agriculture, it is necessary to analyse the entire country at the smallest possible scale, and with a high temporal resolution. This comprehensive regional analysis provides the necessary data, and a decision-making basis, to counter future conflicts of interest related to water use. However, this contrasts with the actual availability of data on irrigation in Germany. A discrepancy exists between data availability and the data requests that has been made to the Thünen-Institute in the course of numerous projects and committee work. Agricultural statistics are an important source of information on the actual spatial distribution of irrigation characteristics. In the agricultural census (full survey) and the agricultural structure survey (sample survey), data is collected from agricultural holdings on the location, legal form, land use, livestock and also on irrigation. The informative value of both statistical surveys differs considerably due to the survey method, the characteristics recorded and the frequency of the survey...