Farm Employment

I had written earlier that there are more prisoners than farmers in the US. I just found this data and now I don't think there are.

The number of farming workers depends on how you define it. There are 3.1 million farm production workers, which includes farm proprietors and wage and salary workers. This would be what most people think of as farmers (and about 50% more than the number of prisoners). There are another 3.2 million closely related jobs (agricultural input, processing and marketing) and a further 17.3 million peripherally related (manufacturing of food and clothing and retail) jobs. All combined they account for 14.28% of all jobs. This is much more than the 1.84% for farm producers and may explain why agricultural subsidies are so tough for the government to cut.

via USDA.gov