U.S. Agriculture & Food Hiring Trends: What Employers and Candidates Need to Know
The U.S. agricultural industry plays a crucial role in supplying everyday essentials while offering millions of stable and rewarding careers. At AgCareers, we’re dedicated to connecting candidates with employers in the agriculture and food sectors. We seek to strengthen the industry’s talent pipeline by raising awareness of the diverse career opportunities available. As part of this commitment, AgCareers conducts an annual analysis of job trends to gain insights into hiring and candidate behavior within the sector. The newly released AgCareers U.S. Agriculture & Food Job Report is available now.
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JOBS
Over 700 employers posted jobs on AgCareers.com in 2024 across more than 20 industry sectors. Crop production was the leading industry type in the U.S., followed by chemical/pesticide/fertilizer, and food & beverage products/processing. Careers were most plentiful in sales, on-farm and operations.
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Employers posted more than half of the U.S. jobs in the Midwest region, with the top-posting states including Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. California and North Carolina posted the most job openings outside the Midwest area. Data from the recent ?AgCareers HR Review reports that 35% of agriculture and food employers offered some type of remote work arrangements. The new AgCareers job report data shows that these remote positions were most frequently sales and business development positions in the chemical and equipment industries.
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CANDIDATES
Likewise, applicants are increasingly searching for work-from-home roles, with “remote” being the top search term on AgCareers.com. Candidates performed over 14,000 searches for remote roles, a 66% increase from the prior year.
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Over 3,200 new U.S. candidates created job seeker accounts on AgCareers in 2024 and added more than 1,700 resumes to the database. There were over 10,000 unique applicants from U.S. candidates, an increase of 25% over the prior year. California and Texas, followed by Iowa, were the top three states for applicants. Seventy percent of applicants had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and more than half had an ag-based degree. Illustrating the breadth of talent, students comprised 13% of applicants, while conversely, 41% of applicants had more than five years of experience.
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Discover more hiring and candidate trends—download your free copy of the entire 2024 U.S. Job Report here.