Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2017 Census of Agriculture, which is done every five years. Agricultural commodity sales in the U.S. in 2017 totaled $388.5 billion, a decrease of 1.6 percent since 2012. Washington’s commodity sales totaled $9.6 billion, an increase of 5.6 percent over 2012. Washington had the nation’s 14^th highest value of sales in 2017. In Washington, 35,793 farm operations had sales in 2017, down from 37,249 in 2012.

The commodities with the highest sales in Washington were fruits, tree nuts, and berries ($3.614 billion); vegetables ($1.095 billion); milk ($1.083 billion); and cattle ($1.069 billion). The Census doesn’t drill down further into these categories—more data on specialty crops (which are very important in Washington, and include crops like apples, pears, cherries, potatoes, onions, and hops) will be released in December.

USDA also made some interesting maps showing farms and acreage across the country. (For example, check out the concentrations of apple and vegetable acreages.)

The Census asks farmers about production costs. Total operating expenses in Washington were $8.5 billion, up 8.0 percent over 2012. (U.S. operating expenses were down 0.8 percent over 2012.) The largest portion of farm operating expenses in Washington was hired labor (25.8 percent of the total).

(Hired labor includes “the total amount paid for farm or ranch labor including regular workers, part-time workers, and members of the producer’s family if they received payments for labor. Expenses include Social Security taxes, State taxes, unemployment tax, payment for sick leave or vacation pay, workman’s compensation, insurance premiums, and pension plans.”)

At $2.2 billion, hired labor expenses in Washington increased 27.3 percent over 2012. (Hired labor expenses nationally increased by 17.2 percent.) Hired labor as a percentage of total expenses was 7^th highest in Washington, but it makes up a higher percentage of expenses than any state with a higher or similar value of sales as Washington. (California has a high percentage of contract labor; if you include that, its labor costs as a percent of total expenses are about the same as Washington’s.)

One reason for Washington’s high agricultural labor costs may be that the mix of crops in Washington require more labor than the mixes in other states. For example, apples are picked by hand (though there are ongoing efforts to automate), but corn (a major crop in Iowa) can be harvested by machine. But labor costs are also generally high in Washington, as we discussed in a 2012 report.

These high costs affect competitiveness. As the Bloomberg Businessweek story I linked to a few days ago notes,

Labor and other costs have been rising steadily for apple farms, even as consumers have slowly soured on industry stalwarts such as Red Delicious and Galas, which together made up about half of Washington’s crop of 120 million boxes last year, according to the Washington Apple Commission. The U.S. domestic market for Washington apples has been static for years, at about 90 million boxes. That puts a premium on developing new export markets and selling higher-margin varieties at home.