SALT LAKE CITY — The entire U.S. food and agriculture industry’s economic impact climbed back to $7.43 trillion, and it helped support over 43.4 million jobs in 2021, showing that the industries are slowly rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an annual report on the industry released Tuesday.
The industries accounted for an economic impact of $71.3 billion in Utah alone last year, according to the 2022 Feeding the Economy report. The annual report is a collaboration of 30 food and agriculture groups that use all sorts of data to form a “farm-to-fork” economic analysis of all things food-related.
The report’s numbers are the result of dozens of agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale and retail datasets. For instance, it factors in the manufacturing of the equipment that helped a farmer grow fruit, which got canned and then sold at a store or restaurant.
The chain of those industries resulted in over 21.4 million direct, 11.2 million indirect, and 10.7 million induced jobs — jobs supported by spending on goods and services by employees — nationwide last year. The industries are linked to nearly one-third of all American jobs and about 7% of the entire U.S. economy, according to the report.
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Written by CARTER WILLIAMS, KSL.com.
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