Making up the most numerous county type, a majority of farming-dependent counties are located in the Midwest.
Farming continues to dominate the economies of many rural counties. Despite the continued long-term decline of farming as a principal source of income, the farming-dependent group, with 556 counties, was the largest of 11 county types. Earnings from farm production activities in these counties ranged from 20 to 89 percent of total labor and proprietors' income (earnings) during 1987-89, with an average farm earnings of 36 percent. Nearly 90 percent of these counties were also classified as farming-dependent in the 1979 typology. Manufacturing-dependent and persistent poverty are the only other types encompassing more than 500 counties.
Because the typology only classifies nonmetro counties, this type excludes metro counties that are high-value producers of agricultural products. Over a third of farms with high gross sales (over $500,000) in 1987 were located in metro counties. Even if they were nonmetro, however, these counties would not likely qualify as farming-dependent because their economies tend to be based on a variety of economic activities.
Well over a third of nonmetro farm earnings and about a fourth of nonmetro farm jobs were found in farming-dependent counties in 1989.
Farming-dependent counties are primarily concentrated in the Great Plains, stretching from North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle (fig. 1). Nearly 300 counties are in the Midwest, mainly on the western side of the region. Another 30 percent (172 counties) are in the South, clustered in the Plains areas of Oklahoma and Texas, the Mississippi Delta, and the nearby livestock/poultry Ozark-Ouachita Mountains, the traditional small farm interior-uplands area of Kentucky, and the coastal plain of Georgia. The remaining 92 counties are in the West, mostly in the northwestern States.
Farming counties accounted for 24 percent of all nonmetro counties, but only 9 percent of nonmetro population, reflecting the predominant sparse settlement and rural character of the counties and continuing outmigration (-11.0 percent) of population during the 1980's. Over two-thirds of the counties had no towns with over 2,500 population in 1990 (table 1). Average county population size was about 8,400 compared with 22,000 for all-nonmetro counties. For every 100 working-age adults, there were 87 residents in the dependent population (either ages 17 and under or 65 and over) in 1990. The farming counties had the highest dependency ratio of the 11 types. This underscores the ongoing outmigration of younger, working-age people. For example, between 1980 and 1990, farming counties lost over 17 percent of their population aged 18-34 years.
The economic base in the farming-dependent group declined throughout the 1980's. Both earnings and jobs dropped during the recessions of the early years. Farming counties, as a group, lost 111,000 farming jobs during 1979-89, with farm jobs declining in most years throughout the period (fig. 2). After the economic recovery began, farming counties were able to replace lost farm jobs with nonfarm jobs, but the gap in total job growth between farming counties and all- nonmetro counties widened because total jobs grewer faster in all nonmetro counties. After the recession, earnings from farming regained some ground, but still remained less than 95 percent of the 1979 figure.
Table 1--Farming-dependent counties:
Selected characteristics
All-
Farming nonmetro
Item Unit counties counties
------------------------- --------- -------- --------
Counties Number 556 2,276
Population, 1990 Thousands 4,647 50,898
Totally rural,1993(1,2) Percent 66.7 34.0
Population density,1990(3,4) Number 11.8 36.3
Population change,1980-90(4) Percent -6.9 .6
Per capita income,1989(4) Dollars 14,743 13,580
Earnings change,1979-89:(5)
Total earnings Percent -6.1 3.4
Farm earnings do. -6.5 -12.5
(1) No persons living in towns of 2,500 population or more.
(2) Percentage of counties in group.
(3) Persons per square mile.
(4) Unweighted county averages.
(5) Calculated from aggregated data.
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