Agriculture: occupational employment and wages

Since the founding of the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program, almost all the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sector was out of scope for the OES survey. This study uses special tabulations of data collected as part of the Green Goods and Services Occupations survey combined with OES data to analyze the agricultural sector as a whole. Data showed that two of three states with the most employment in the sector had mean wages below average. The two largest occupations, farmworkers and laborers, crop, nursery, and greenhouse; and farmworkers, farm, ranch, and aquacultural animals, which directly relate to the major economic activity of the sector, dominated employment in the agricultural sector, thus affecting its mean, median, and percentile wages.