Agri Statistics Show Jobs Sector Shifting

Old McDonald has traded his overalls in for a clown suit and a rubber nose.

The continuing crawl of farm production jobs off the farm and into peripherally related fields, primarily restaurants and other service- or distribution-oriented food jobs, has spelled a flip-flop in the make up of the state’s agriculture employment sector. In short, more workers now flip burgers for customers than roll bales of hay for cows.

In 2001, the last year for which complete data is available through the United State Department of Agriculture, there were 310,063 farm-related jobs in Arkansas. That represented 20.7 percent of the 1,496,569 total jobs statewide. Of the farm jobs, nearly 49 percent or 151,053 were classified as “agri wholesale/retail trades.”

Twenty years ago, the same retail segment represented 33.1 percent, or 79,266 of the state’s total 239,354 farm jobs. A 20-year look at agriculture jobs in Arkansas is available here: www.arkansasbusiness.com/farm_jobs.

During the same span, farm production jobs fell from 83,535 in 1981 (8.6 percent of statewide total) to 62,256 in 2001 (4.2 percent of statewide total).

Alex Majchrowicz, an agricultural economist for the USDA in Washington, D.C., said about one in five jobs nationwide are related to agriculture, so Arkansas is in line with the trend.

A more conservative report by a group of University of Arkansas professors on agriculture’s affect on the state economy held that there were 291,290 agriculture related jobs in 2001. The difference from the USDA Agri Census numbers, professors said, has to do with how farms are classified and the fact the data sets are compiled from different sources.

But even using the UA’s numbers, wages from those jobs totaled $7.8 billion or 13 percent of all wages in Arkansas. The value-added effect of those wages was $13.1 billion, according to the report.

That’s 21 percent of that year’s gross state product of about $62 billion.

Arkansas farm cash receipts (what farmers sold) for 2003 totaled $5.3 billion, up 18 percent from $4.5 billion in 2002 primarily due to favorable row crop and cattle pricing. The figures are according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical Service.

The state’s crop cash receipts were up 40 percent from $1.5 billion in 2002 to $2.1 billion in 2003. Livestock receipts during the same span were up 7 percent from $3 billion to $3.2 billion.

Bruce Dixon, an agricultural economics and economics professor at the UA, said there may be fewer farms but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s less land in production.

“We’ve had a decline from a high of 6.5 million American farms this century to about 2 million nationwide right now,” Dixon said. “But we’re more efficient.”

Dixon said if returns to farming continue to decline by, for example, changes to government programs and global market opportunities, the expansion of large farms to capture economies of size may decline and the substitution of capital for labor may be slowed.