The Glass Harvest: Five Crops Europe Grows Under Cover (2024)

The Covered Five: What the Dataset Tracks Under Glass

Eurostat keeps a separate production series for five crops grown under glass or high accessible cover: tomatoes (V3100S), cucumbers (V3200S), peppers (V3600S), strawberries (S0000S) and lettuce (V2300S). In 2024 they came to a combined 10 713.4 thousand tonnes across the reporting member states, against 9 991.5 thousand tonnes in 2015 — a decade gain of +7.2% for a group of crops whose market is built on fresh, short-lived produce.

The chart beside this section ranks the five by their 2024 tonnage. Tomatoes dominate at 5 315.9 thousand tonnes, roughly half the covered total. Cucumbers follow at 2 177.2 thousand tonnes and peppers at 2 117.0, effectively level with each other, then strawberries at 746.4 and lettuce at 356.8.

Two caveats belong at the start. First, apro_cpsh1 publishes no EU-27 aggregate line for any of these five covered codes, so every European figure in this article is a sum of the member states that reported that crop — and the number of reporters differs from crop to crop and from year to year. Second, "high accessible cover" means glass, plastic tunnels and walk-in structures a person can reach into, so these series are broader than heated glass alone.

Spain's Glass South: Peppers, Cucumbers and Strawberries

Spain is the covered-crop leader of the European Union. Its 2024 harvest includes 1 216.4 thousand tonnes of covered peppers — 57.5% of the member-state sum for that crop — 743.8 thousand tonnes of cucumbers (34.2%) and 319.5 thousand tonnes of strawberries (42.8%). It also tops covered tomatoes, with 1 501.8 thousand tonnes and a thinner 28.3% share. The chart beside this section ranks countries by combined five-crop tonnage: Spain stands at 3 804.2 thousand tonnes, more than twice the Dutch total and the largest in Europe.

The Spanish model is field-scale and area-based rather than ultra-intensive. Covered peppers occupy 15.7 thousand hectares, up from 12.4 thousand hectares in 2015, and yield 77.4 tonnes per hectare. Cucumbers use 8.2 thousand hectares at 91.3 tonnes per hectare and strawberries 6.8 thousand hectares at 47.1 tonnes per hectare. Those are solid covered yields; the Dutch figures in the next section are a different order of magnitude.

Behind Spain the ranking splits into national specialisms. The Netherlands is second with 1 718.5 thousand tonnes, Poland third with 1 380.5, Italy fourth with 1 101.0, France fifth with 718.8 and Greece sixth with 638.3. Poland's combined total rests mainly on tomatoes (815.3) and cucumbers (305.2), Greece's on strawberries (133.9) and cucumbers (131.9). One quirk is worth noting: France reports no covered peppers at all in 2024, so its combined figure is carried entirely by the other four crops.

The Dutch Precision Tier: Second Everywhere

The Netherlands is the second-largest covered-crop producer in Europe with 1 718.5 thousand tonnes in 2024 — and second in three of the five crops individually: tomatoes at 828.5 thousand tonnes (15.6% of the member sum), cucumbers at 416.0 thousand tonnes (19.1%) and peppers at 406.6 thousand tonnes (19.2%). It is also fourth in covered strawberries with 66.0 thousand tonnes, 8.8% of the European total.

What sets the Dutch tier apart is yield per hectare, not hectares. Dutch covered tomatoes yield 478.9 tonnes per hectare on 1.7 thousand hectares, Dutch cucumbers 650.0 tonnes per hectare on 0.6 thousand hectares and Dutch peppers 259.0 tonnes per hectare on 1.6 thousand hectares. Spain reaches 89.9, 91.3 and 77.4 tonnes per hectare on the same three crops. The Netherlands produces comparable volumes from a fraction of the land, which is the point of a glasshouse economy.

The decade line chart beside this section plots the European member sums for all five crops. Tomatoes, the biggest line at 5 315.9 thousand tonnes in 2024, dipped to 4 772.8 in 2023 before recovering. Cucumbers grew from 1 949.1 to 2 177.2 thousand tonnes, a net +11.7%. Lettuce is almost motionless, moving from 355.6 to 356.8 thousand tonnes, a +0.35% decade change and a coefficient of variation of just 3.1. Dutch national stability is more mixed: the Dutch tomato series varies by 7.3% and the Dutch strawberry series by 28%, so precision does not always mean a flat line.

Italy's Lettuce Surprise

Covered lettuce is the smallest of the five crops — 356.8 thousand tonnes in 2024 — and it has one dominant producer. Italy grew 189.3 thousand tonnes, 53.1% of the entire member sum, up from 124.4 thousand tonnes in 2015, a gain of +52.2%. No other country is close: France, the former number two, fell from 61.8 to 40.8 thousand tonnes, down 34.1%.

The Italian expansion is real land, not just better reporting: covered lettuce area rose from 3.8 to 5.5 thousand hectares between 2015 and 2024, and Italian covered lettuce yields 34.2 tonnes per hectare. France farmed 1.8 thousand hectares of covered lettuce in 2024 at 22.9 tonnes per hectare, while Belgium, the third-largest producer with 28.6 thousand tonnes, works 0.7 thousand hectares at 42.7 tonnes per hectare.

Lettuce is also the steadiest line of the five at European level, with a coefficient of variation of 3.1% and a decade change of +0.35% — and that stability is the product of a large Italian rise cancelling a French, Belgian and Portuguese decline. Italy itself varies by 13.7% and France by 16.3%. The grouped 2015-versus-2024 chart beside this section shows the same contrast across all five crops: lettuce and tomatoes nearly unchanged, while cucumbers, peppers and strawberries all sit meaningfully above their decade start.

Why Covered Data Matters: The Steadiest Shelves in Europe

The five covered crops are, on the whole, among the steadiest series in European crop statistics. Measured by coefficient of variation across the 2015-2024 window, lettuce moves 3.1%, tomatoes 4.6%, cucumbers 5.4% and strawberries 6.7%. Peppers are the exception at 12.3%, and their decade tells the story: 1 629.1 thousand tonnes in 2015, a long climb to a 2022 peak of 2 336.3, then a drop to 1 961.9 in 2023 and a recovery to 2 117.0 in 2024.

Concentration is the other reason this dataset matters. The chart beside this section shows the leading country's share in each covered crop, and it runs from 28.3% in tomatoes to 57.5% in peppers. Spain is number one in four crops — tomatoes 28.3%, cucumbers 34.2%, strawberries 42.8% and peppers 57.5% — while Italy is number one in lettuce at 53.1%. Single-country dependence is therefore a real planning issue for peppers and lettuce, and much less so for tomatoes, where four countries sit above 10% of the member sum.

Read with its limits in mind, this is a well-behaved dataset. No covered code has an official EU-27 aggregate, so totals are sums of reporters and they move when reporting changes: France's covered pepper series is zero throughout, and the Dutch lettuce series collapsed from 9.5 to 1.4 thousand tonnes, which is a reporting break as much as an agronomic one. Country-level volatility is higher than the European average nearly everywhere — Poland's covered peppers vary by 42.9%. The steady European line is an average of steadier and jumpier national ones.

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