Report Shows How Agriculture Impacts The U.S. Economy

As part of last week's National Ag Day, a broad range of 36 food and agriculture organizations collaborated to produce the 9th annual Feeding the Economy Report.  One of the groups sponsoring the report is the Corn Refiners Association, and CRA President and John Bode said the report comes to some important conclusions.

"It shows the overall impact of agricultural-related industries on the U.S. economy, and the big news from this year is that our ag economy is really important to the overall economy, but it's experiencing some stress.”

Bode said the report’s data offers important observations for the future of agriculture.

“That's $9.5 trillion in total output, so that's important, and it shows an increase of 25% since the pandemic," Bode said.  "So, ag is resilient. It's big, but we are experiencing some real stress, and that's why, over the last year, we declined by $100 billion in output, and the overall economy has grown during that time.  So, in the past year, our contributions to the overall economy have declined from 20% to 18.7%.”

The Feeding the Economy Report also shows Ag manufacturing job numbers have dropped.

“Ag manufacturing jobs are really important. We have almost as many Americans working in manufacturing that is agriculture-related, as in farming, and that is twice as many people as working in chemical manufacturing and four times as many people as in automobile manufacturing," Bode pointed out.  "So, those 2.28 million jobs in ag manufacturing are big in our economy, and they're important. But let's also recognize we have lost 30,000 jobs in ag manufacturing since the pandemic, and that's a problem.”

What does the report mean for the future of agriculture?

“I think it means that agriculture's important, and it's especially important to jobs in rural America and has an important role to play," he said.  "But these economic fundamentals create headwinds for us, and we need to address those for the health of the overall contributions to the overall economy.”

Overall, the report shows more than 47 million Americans have jobs directly or indirectly related to food and agriculture.  Check out the entire report Here.

You can also look at a county by county breakdown of the report Here

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