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Andrew Carr's avatar

It’s very interesting that agriculture accounts for only 2.1 percent of California’s GDP. I always imagined it to account for a larger share. Regarding the substantial jump in Kern County’s agricultural output: I wonder what types of crops the county produces, and why demand for them was (presumably) quite strong. (Forgive me if I am not interpreting the findings correctly!)

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Daniel MacDonald's avatar

Thank you for your comment! Agriculture only accounts for 1.1% of U.S. GDP, so 2.1% is relatively high. And of course, 13% is even higher.

I took a look at the county's agricultural report for 2020: http://www.kernag.com/caap/crop-reports/crop20_29/crop2020.pdf. Note that these are gross values and are not adjusted for price changes, but it appears that between 2019 and 2020, there was a pretty significant increase in egg production. Most of the other crops changed very little, but since eggs account for 13% of total county agricultural production (again, from a value and not an output standpoint, so not perfectly comparable to real GDP), this might explain the "substantial jump".

I forgot to mention that the industry code groups "agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting" together, so I suppose technically those other sub-sectors could be driving trends as well. But that's not likely.

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Andrew Carr's avatar

Thank you so much for the additional context, and for sharing the link to the county’s 2020 report.

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Andrew Carr's avatar

It’s very interesting to see that agriculture accounts for only 2.1% of California’s GDP. I always imagined (without actually looking at data) that agriculture accounted for a larger share. Regarding the big jump in agricultural output in Kern County: Do you have a sense of the types of crops produced there?

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