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Comment by sharkmerry | Hacker News Reader

> The US has a population of 261 million and an employed non-farm workforce of 145 million, per the BLS.

>According to the most recent US employment report, there are 145.8 million nonfarm payroll workers out of a total population of 332 million.

ignoring the mismatching "Populations". (261 million seems to be "Civilian noninstitutional population")

This [0] seems to say there are 152,283,000 employed in US.

are there really ~6.4 million people working on farms in US? i thought farm work was <1% of employed peoples.

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Probably has to do with precise definitions of "non farm", "farmer", "farming" and "agricultural".

BLS has this showing 2.3 million people working in agriculture: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat15.htm

And this showing there are 900,000 jobs for "Agricultural worker" https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/mobile/...

Clearly the terms "Employed persons in agriculture industries" and "agricultural workers" have definitions that diverge much, much more than I would have thought as a layperson.

If you expand the "What Agricultural Workers Do" section, it says:

> Agricultural workers maintain crops and tend livestock. They perform physical labor and operate machinery under the supervision of farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers.

According to https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-othe..., there are 952,000 jobs as "agricultural managers," which isn't how I'd naively expect things to be divided, but it does make sense.

I wonder how the remaining jobs are categorized.

If agricultural workers are people working under the guidance of other folks then managers may also include the "self-managed" i.e. any independent farmers including those that rely heavily on automation. There's also probably a fair chance that subcontracting can mess this up with multiple farm hands hired onto a farm all counting as agricultural managers.

It feels like agricultural worker is actually quite narrowly defined to only be unskilled people specifically requiring oversight and management.

With automation, they may not manage anybody anymore, just machinery.

Eventually, we'll need philosophers to sort it all out.

Luckily, there is no shortage of philosophers, especially on the internet.

Nonfarm also excludes military workers and non-profit employees, and a couple other categories.

There are 328 million according to the Census

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

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