Agriculture, forestry & fishing

Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share located in NAICS sector 11. This is a composition measure: the twenty sectors together account for the whole reachable job pool, so a place with few jobs overall and a place with many can be compared on the mix of work available rather than its size. See Accessible jobs for how the reachable pool is defined.

The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments primarily engaged in growing crops, raising animals, harvesting timber, and harvesting fish and other animals from a farm, ranch, or their natural habitats," describing them as "farms, ranches, dairies, greenhouses, nurseries, orchards, or hatcheries" (2022 NAICS definitions). The sector covers two activities: production itself, and support activities such as soil preparation, planting, harvesting and management performed on a contract or fee basis.

What appears in this measure is narrower than farming as a whole. LODES counts unemployment-insurance-covered wage and salary jobs, and the Bureau lists the self-employed among the job types outside that frame (LODES Design and Methodology Report). Owner-operated and tenant-operated farms — which the sector definition explicitly includes — are therefore largely absent, while hired farm labor, contract support operations, greenhouses, logging firms and processing-adjacent establishments are counted. Read this as the presence of agricultural employers rather than as the extent of farmland.