What Agriculture Means to Arkansas

The University of Arkansas has compiled data that shows just how vital agriculture is to the Natural State’s economy.

• Agriculture accounts for nearly one-quarter of Arkansas’s economic activity. 
  
  
• The industry accounted for over $20 billion of value added (employee compensation, propriety income, other property-type income and indirect business taxes) to the Arkansas economy in 2012.

• One out of every six jobs in Arkansas is tied, either directly or indirectly, to agriculture.

• 44,660: The number of farms operating in Arkansas (as of 2013).

• 13.8 Million: Those 44,600 farms occupied 13.8 million acres in 2013.

• No. 1: Arkansas is the top rice-producing state in the nation.

• No. 2: Arkansas produces the second most broiler chickens in the nation.

• No. 3: Arkansas is the third-largest producer of catfish in the United States.

• No. 4: Arkansas ranks fourth in the nation in the production of cotton, cottonseed and turkeys.

• No 5: Arkansas is the country’s fifth largest producer of grain sorghum. 

It should also be noted that Arkansas’s agriculture industry is incredibly diverse. If we had to survive solely on food grown in state, you wouldn’t have trouble finding variety. Our state is among the nation’s top ten producers of rice, chicken, catfish, turkey, soybeans, and eggs. We could also conceivably clothe and shelter ourselves from fiber grown in Arkansas, as we are third in the nation in cotton production and fifth in the nation in timber production.