On Tuesday, or National Ag Day, Feeding The Economy released its 2023 report. This report takes information from 25 food and agriculture groups to illustrate the food and agriculture sector’s impact on local and nationwide economic activity.

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This year’s reports show that the food and agriculture sector in the U.S. accounts for 23 million jobs providing $927 billion in wages. 793,301 of those jobs are in Iowa, accounting for $43.7 billion in wages.

John Bode is the CEO and President of the Corn Refiners Association, one of the groups that contribute to the report. He says, “the growth continues to be very large, and American agriculture writ large is resilient. So compared with last year, every single space had growth and when you look at it for example in Iowa wages grew over 15% compared with last year, and we saw very strong growth from pre-pandemic.”

The report also breaks down each state into congressional districts. In Iowa District 2, or northeast Iowa, there were 199,384 jobs amounting to $11.1 billion in wages relating to agriculture and food.

On a national level, some of the important findings from the report include;

Total Jobs: 46,283,917 (up 1.5% since the 2019 report)
Total Wages: $2.61 trillion (up 26.2% since the 2019 report)
Total Taxes: $947.93 billion (up 3.8% since the 2019 report)
Exports: $202.2 billion (up 24.4% since the 2019 report)

Total Food and Ag Industry Economic Impact: $8.6 trillion (up 21.8% since the 2019 report)

Not all of the growth seen was on the farm, Bode says that much of the growth comes through processing and retail. He adds that when you compare growth to the pandemic years, a lot of growth comes from restaurants.

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