Drive almost anywhere in North Carolina and you will pass visible reminders of our agricultural heritage: corn, soybeans, tobacco, all the way to the tree line. Agriculture is unusually visible work, and that visibility shapes how the state thinks about itself. The legacy of tobacco alone underwrote many of our foundational institutions — Duke and Wake Forest among them, along with their hometowns of Durham and Winston-Salem. That tradition is a meaningful part of what North Carolina is and will remain.
Yet most North Carolinians today are personally far removed from the practice of agriculture. As a result, many people are unaware just how significantly the agriculture industry has transformed, and how it looks and operates very differently in our state today than most people are aware. Three misconceptions in particular are worth correcting: that of the size of North Carolina’s agriculture industry itself, what it produces, and its distribution across the state.
North Carolina’s 16th-largest industry
The most common misconception about agriculture is its scale. Agriculture today constitutes a bit less than 1% of North Carolina’s entire economy: approximately 0.8% in 2024. Of the state’s gross domestic product of roughly $844 billion in 2024, agriculture generated approximately $7 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This figure includes not only all farming, but also commercial fishing, greenhouse and nursery production, and forestry and logging (ex. Christmas trees) all rolled together. Taken together, agriculture is roughly the state’s 16th-largest industry.
Many people are surprised to learn this fact, because for many years, the farm lobby has promoted a very different story in its marketing. A widely cited report from NC State asserts $111 billion in “total economic impact” for North Carolina agriculture, which the NC Chamber of Commerce and others have used to claim that agriculture is an “$111 billion industry” and “North Carolina’s #1 industry.” But this is factually incorrect, and results from a basic misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of data.
Economic impact estimates like this one are a standard and routine exercise. They report on any economic activity influenced by a given sector, including supply chains and the spending of its workers. The NC State report, in particular, attributes all restaurants and food service, clothing retailers, furniture manufacturing, and even pharmaceuticals as part of agriculture’s total “impact.” And as a measure of impact, broadly defined, this is valid.
However as a measure of the industry itself, it is flatly inaccurate. Apply the same accounting to any other industry - like finance, healthcare, or technology - and each would individually exceed the entire state economy several times over. These claims are best understood as marketing undertaken by the farm lobby to promote itself politically, just as other industries do. A $7 billion industry is still a very large one - just not the biggest in North Carolina.
What North Carolina produces
The second big misconception is about what North Carolina farming actually produces.
Ask most North Carolinians today what they believe the state’s largest agricultural product is, and many will still say tobacco. This reflects a historical view of what was, indeed, the economic foundation of much of North Carolina as a state throughout the 20th century. But it does not hold today.
North Carolina’s largest agricultural product by far is not a field crop at all. In 2024, livestock accounted for 74% of all farm cash receipts, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Poultry, broiler chickens in particular, was the single largest category at 41%, and hogs were second at 17%.
All plant-based crops combined made up just over a quarter, at 26%. The biggest single slice of that was a miscellany — Christmas trees, nursery and greenhouse stock, hay, small grains — rather than the row crops most people picture. Soybeans were next at 4.5%. Tobacco, on which so much of the state’s agricultural self-image rests, was 3.4%.
The dominant character of North Carolina agriculture today is not family farms taking their harvest to market. It is vertically integrated corporate animal production, whose economics are characteristically unsentimental.
In the poultry and hog industries, growers own the land, the barns, and the equipment - and, just as importantly, they carry heavy seasonal debt. The corporate integrator owns the animals, their feed, and makes most key production decisions. The grower’s return is typically a fee for meeting a production quota set in advance. In short, animal agriculture today is closer to contract work than to the independent proprietorship of the old archetype. That model now describes the majority of the state’s agricultural output.
Where the farms are
The third large misconception is geographic.
North Carolina’s farm economy is not evenly distributed, and most rural counties do not have large agricultural sectors. Instead, farming is heavily concentrated. In only five counties does agriculture constitute 20% or more of the entire local economy: Anson (24.8%), Jones (23.8%), Duplin (22.5%), Gates (21.2%), and Bertie (20.5%).
It should be noted that two of these, Jones and Gates counties, are very small counties (populations 9,600 and 10,000, respectively) whose economies are correspondingly small, so a large share still represents a modest absolute sum. Across the entire state, in only fifteen counties is the farm sector bigger than 5% of the local economy.
More revealing is what happens when you separate the absolute size of a county’s farm sector from agriculture’s share of that county’s economy. Just twelve counties produce more than half of North Carolina’s entire agricultural output. But in most of those counties, agriculture is still a relatively small part of the local economic base.
Union County, for example, has the third-largest farm economy in the state - it is home to major poultry processing operations. Yet agriculture is just 2.6% of the county economy. Wayne, Wilkes, Robeson, and Randolph rank sixth through ninth in statewide farm output, but Wilkes leads that group at 8%, with Wayne (4%), Robeson (4.3%), and Randolph (3.2%) lower still. Mecklenburg County is the tenth-largest agricultural county in North Carolina, and agriculture is approximately 0.1% of its economy.
Agriculture is hard work
Agriculture is deeply meaningful to North Carolina - to our heritage, its landscape, and our sense of place. As long as humans need to eat, agriculture will always be a central part of how our society thinks of itself.
Yet times have rarely been more difficult for the American farmer than they are today. Small family farmers are under tremendous margin pressure from spiraling input costs like fuel and fertilizer, while the Big Ag lobby more and more represents only the interests of vertically integrated, multinational corporate giants. Agriculture will play a key role in the future of rural economic development in North Carolina - but it begins by a realistic assessment of the industry as it exists today, not in the days of yesteryear.