Opinion
Agriculture is routinely invoked as one of the foundations of Wyoming’s economy, particularly when decisions involve public lands and access, water or wildlife. But if an industry is truly an economic “backbone,” the data should support that assertion. It should account for a substantial share of employment, wages and economic production.
Agriculture does none of those things.
The most recent annual employment data from the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services show that the entire private agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting sector supported almost exactly 1% of Wyoming employment.
Beef cattle ranching and farming, the industry arguably most synonymous with the Cowboy State, accounted for just 0.6% of 2025 statewide employment.
The wage numbers also fail to surpass 1% of Wyoming’s overall wages. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting generated approximately 0.74% of Wyoming wages. Average annual pay in the agriculture sector was $46,709, well below the state average of $63,511. In 2024, the entire agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting sector — which combines livestock grazing on public and private lands, farming, and guiding and outfitting business — generated just 1.5% of state gross domestic product.
That was not an anomalous year. Looking back through the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data, agriculture has produced a small fraction of Wyoming’s total economic output for decades.
For comparison, the mining industry (which includes oil and gas) generated approximately $6.9 billion of the $51 billion Wyoming GDP in 2024, more than 10 times the value added by agriculture. Construction generated approximately $3.2 billion.
Perhaps more revealing is outdoor recreation.
In 2024, the Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated that outdoor recreation generated 4.5% of state GDP, more than three times the economic contribution of crop and animal production, and supported 16,545 jobs.
The contrast becomes even more striking when economic footprint is compared with physical footprint.
The University of Wyoming Extension identifies irrigated agriculture as Wyoming’s largest consumptive water use by far. Its statewide water analysis estimates that irrigated agriculture accounts for 80 to 85% of all consumptive water use (water removed from the available supply and not returned to the hydrologic system) in Wyoming. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2023 Irrigation and Water Management Survey found that about 87% of Wyoming’s irrigated acreage was devoted to alfalfa, other hay, or pasture, forage and grazing resources used to support livestock production.
USDA’s 2024 Wyoming agricultural statistics report estimates that the state’s agricultural exports were worth $409.6 million, equivalent to about 21.5% of total farm cash receipts.
The much larger numbers commonly cited for agriculture measure something different. The familiar $1.6 billion figure cited in the news represents gross agricultural sales, not value added, while University of Wyoming’s $2.5 billion ‘economic impact’ estimate also includes spending by suppliers and households. Those ripple effects occur in every industry, which is why economic impact totals should not be compared directly with GDP.
This complicates a political argument Wyoming residents hear constantly: that extraordinary public accommodation of agriculture is necessary because ranching is indispensable to Wyoming’s economy, or because Wyoming agriculture is necessary to “feed America.” Wyoming’s outsized resource commitment does not translate into outsized cattle production: The state produced just 1.2% of the nation’s cattle and calves by weight in 2025, while Wisconsin produced nearly three times as much.
Agriculture is a small part of Wyoming’s modern economy, but an enormous consumer of its natural resources. Ranching interests are routinely given extraordinary weight in debates over public lands, water allocation, large carnivore management, wildlife habitat and federal land policy. If Wyoming is going to make consequential choices about finite public resources, those choices should proportionately reflect the scale of each sector’s economic benefits and costs, not an inherited and outdated assumption of agricultural dominance.
