County With More Cows Than People Leads U.S. Labor Market More cows than people live in northern Colorado’s Weld County, yet this wind-swept prairie led the nation’s big counties in job growth thanks to agricultural production coupled with an energy boom. A new cheese plant, along with oil and gas drilling and wind turbine manufacturing, boosted employment in the county 7.5 percent in the year ended March 2014, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the 339 counties with the most jobs. It was the second consecutive top ranking for the largely rural, 4,000-square-mile county, which had a 6 percent gain in December 2013 from a year earlier. While the largest employment increases were in mining and construction, officials in Greeley, the county seat, have sought to diversify the region’s economic base even as development of the nation’s sixth-largest oil reserve intensified. The Weld Counties of the nation have been key in driving U.S. employment gains, building on natural resources and agricultural production as a more widespread labor-market recovery took hold, economists say. The broadening of the economic base will help provide a buffer as oil prices drop. “You see some metros being able to convert the growth that comes from the oil and gas sector into [...] newsintx/county-with-more-cows-than-people-leads-u-s-labor-market/
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 08:40:12 +0000