Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting (United States) — NAICS 11

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors. NAICS — the North American Industry Classification System, the code set the United States, Canada, and Mexico use to sort businesses by activity — reserves code 11, "Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting," for the two-digit "sector": the widest bucket, the whole of the primary land-and-water economy. It is where food, fiber, and wood are taken from nature — grown, raised, cut, or caught — before any factory turns them into groceries, lumber, or leather. The sector holds five three-digit subsectors: 111 Crop Production, 112 Animal Production and Aquaculture, 113 Forestry and Logging, 114 Fishing, Hunting and Trapping, and 115 Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry. This page synthesizes the five child primers plus our ground-truth federal statistics for the sector; it does not re-research from scratch. Its distinctive value is the contrast across the five — which are big, which are growing, who owns them, and how (or whether) you can invest. For any single subsector, read its child primer. Tickers and multiples are reserved for the investable-universe and how-to-invest sections; every acronym is defined on first use.

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1. Overview

NAICS 11 is the base of the entire food, fiber, and forest-products economy — the farm, the ranch, the feedlot, the pond, the orchard, the forest, and the fishing ground, but not the mill, the slaughter plant, the cannery, or the sawmill, which all sit downstream in Manufacturing (chiefly NAICS 31–33). It is one of the oldest and largest blocks of real activity in the country and, at the same time, one of the least visible in ordinary business statistics and the least accessible through public stock markets — a paradox this page exists to explain.

Three facts frame the whole sector for an investor, and they hold across all five children:

1. It is enormous in output and nearly invisible as "businesses." Add up the children's best-available figures and the sector produces on the order of half a trillion dollars-plus of primary farm-, forest-, and water-gate output a year (Section 3) — yet the federal business register counts barely 22,752 employer firms and $9.2 billion of payroll for the whole sector, because it excludes crop and animal farming by design. The two subsectors that carry the money have no ingested federal business statistics at all — not a suppressed cell, an empty file [3][4]. The government's own headcount sees less than two cents on every output dollar.
2. You mostly cannot buy the production. The primary layer — the farms, ranches, boats, and forests — is overwhelmingly private, family-held, cooperative, and fragmented. There is no listed pure-play for most of it. Public capital reaches the sector indirectly: land and timberland real-estate investment trusts (REITs — listed companies that own income property and pass most profit to shareholders), input and equipment suppliers, grain merchants, food and protein processors, and a thin handful of near-pure-plays clustered in poultry/eggs, hogs, and two niche corners of forestry support. Private capital reaches it directly: owning the land, the herd, the timber tract, the quota, or the water.
3. The durable value is in the scarce asset, not the act of production. Across every child the operator earns a thin, cyclical, price-taker spread on a large, illiquid real asset — and a second, steadier return accrues to whoever owns the underlying land, water, timberland, catch quota, breeding genetics, or processing capacity. The crop is the coupon; the asset is the bond. That split is now visible in the ownership data itself: roughly 40% of U.S. farmland is rented, and ~79% of rented farmland is owned by non-farmers [12][7].

What makes this a real rollup rather than a pass-through is how sharply the five children diverge underneath that shared spine — in size, direction, economic model, ownership, and how a dollar of capital can reach them. That contrast is Section 2.

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2. What's inside — the five children and how they differ

The sector splits into five three-digit subsectors. Two of them (crop and animal) are the primary-production giants that carry almost all the money; one (support) is the for-hire service layer bolted on top; and two (forestry/logging and fishing/hunting) are smaller wild-and-woody resource businesses. They share a DNA — take a biological product from land or water, capture a thin margin, and let the underlying asset carry the wealth — but they diverge on nearly everything an investor weighs. The table leads with economic weight; tickers are reserved for Sections 4 and 10.

*Approximate shares of the sector's primary output value, carried up from the children on mixed bases and mixed years (2022 Census farm sales and crop values for crops; 2024 farm cash receipts, implied from cattle's 41.7% share of animal-product receipts, for animals; delivered-wood and landings values for forestry and fishing). They are a proxy for relative weight, not an audited sector total, and they do not reconcile cleanly — see Section 3. Support (115) is a fee-for-service layer measured in revenue, shown separately because adding it to primary output would double-count.

The through-line — and the sector's central paradox. Two ways of sizing NAICS 11 give opposite pictures of which children matter:

• By what the land and water actually produce, the sector is crop and animal farming and almost nothing else: those two children are ~96% of primary output; forestry/logging, fishing/hunting, and the support layer are, in dollar terms, a rounding error on top of a $555-billion base.
• By the federal business register — the only ground-truth statistics that exist for the sector as a whole — crop and animal farming are literally zero (excluded, Section 3), and the sector is entirely the support layer (~64% of payroll), forestry/logging (~31%), and fishing/hunting (~5%). The two children that are the money don't appear; the three that are the rounding error are the official record.

And investability inverts the picture a third way. The single cleanest listed route to the sector's economics is a timberland REIT (in the 3%-of-output forestry child) or a farmland REIT (owning the land under the 49%-of-output crop child) — you buy the asset, not the operation. The only near-pure operating equities sit in a narrow band of animal production (eggs, chicken, one hog name, lab animals) and in two certified niches of forestry support (wildfire retardant and aerial firefighting) [7]. The two biggest primary businesses have the worst direct public access; the small woody and support children have the best, because their value is concentrated in ownable land or a gated niche. An investor who "buys U.S. agriculture" is almost never buying a farm.

Four more contrasts define the group:

• Capital and labor split it in every direction. Grain and timberland are land-extensive, low-labor real-asset holdings; fruit, vegetables, greenhouse, and hand-harvest fishing are labor-intensive (labor ~40% of cost in tree crops, ~37% in horticulture, versus ~12% for farming overall) [3]; poultry and hogs are integrator-and-barn systems; livestock genetics and lab animals are IP-rich, recurring-revenue businesses. A corn field, a strawberry field, a broiler barn, a pine plantation, a crab boat, and a bull stud are almost economic opposites.
• They ride different clocks. Grain is in a policy-propped down-cycle; cattle is at a genuine 75-year scarcity high; poultry is a structural grower; timber tracks housing and rates; fishing is capped by nature and law; support bifurcates by end market — and inside support, the crop, cattle, and forest cycles are three separate cycles, so a bad year for one child is not automatically a bad year for another [7].
• Three children now carry near-pure operating listings — poultry/eggs and hogs inside animal production, and the fire-retardant and aerial-firefighting niches inside support; the rest are reachable only through the asset (land, timberland) or middlemen (processors, merchants, genetics).
• The safety net and the biggest tailwinds are child-specific. Biofuel pulls almost entirely on grain and oilseed; the Farm Bill price floors cover commodity crops but treat fruit/vegetables/horticulture as "specialty" outsiders; disease (H5N1 above all) is the master risk in animals; housing is the master swing for timber; catch quota is the master asset in fishing; and federal appropriations — reforestation money and wildfire budgets — are effectively the demand curve for forestry support [7][21].

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3. How big it is (this level's rollup + undercount caveat)

Our ground-truth statistics for NAICS 11 are real, exact — and blind to most of the sector. Our ingested federal file for the sector is the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) for 2023, which counts employer businesses (those with paid employees), their workers, and payroll [2]:

These four figures capture only three of the five children — and none of the two biggest. CBP, the Economic Census, Statistics of U.S. Businesses, Nonemployer Statistics, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment census all exclude crop production (111) and animal production (112) by design — farming and ranching are outside the payroll-business universe [2][3][4]. So the sector total above is, exactly, the sum of only the three "rim" children:

The three add up to the sector total to the dollar — on establishments, employees, annual payroll, and first-quarter payroll ($1,245,279 + $680,752 + $91,160 thousand = $2,017,191) — confirming that crop and animal farming contribute nothing to the official business count [2][5][6][7]. Two things the reconciled data do show:

• Seasonality is stamped on the payroll. First-quarter payroll is ~22% of the annual total, below an even quarter's 25% — work compressed into planting, harvest, and fire seasons. Forestry support is the most seasonal (Q1 ≈ 19% of its year), animal support the least (≈ 23%) [7].
• Pay levels invert the size ranking. The smallest rim child pays the most: fishing/hunting averages ~$75,200 per employee, and within it fishing runs ~$88,000 against hunting's ~$46,000 — because fishing's W-2 payroll is concentrated in a small, capital-intensive corporate core (pollock cooperatives and at-sea processors) [6]. Forestry and logging average ~$59,000 [5]; inside support, forestry work runs ~$65,000, crop ~$56,000, and animal ~$45,000 [7].

Read the $9.2 billion as wages for the support-services, forestry-logging, and wild-harvest rim of the land economy — not as the size of American agriculture, which is roughly sixty times larger at the farm gate.

The closest thing to a true sector total. Carrying up each child's best available output figure lands the sector on the order of ~$575 billion of primary output a year, plus a service layer on top:

Read the ~$575 billion only as an order of magnitude. The figures come from different surveys in different years on different rulers — farm sales and crop value for crops, cash receipts for animals, delivered-wood revenue for logging, ex-vessel (first-sale, dockside) value for fishing. ("Ex-vessel" is the dockside price a boat gets before any processing.) They do not reconcile, and the crop and animal figures are themselves indicative sums their own primers flag as approximate — the animal child notes that aquaculture and much of its residual bucket (honey, pollination, horses, laboratory animals) sit partly outside the receipts series it is built from, so the true animal footprint is somewhat larger than $270B and genuinely hard to total [4]. But the shape is unambiguous: crops (~49%) and animals (~47%) are ~96% of the sector; the woody and wild children are ~4%; and the support layer is a service business on top.

A second, income-side anchor. USDA's Economic Research Service forecasts 2026 net farm income near $153.4 billion against record production expenses of roughly $477.7 billion [10][7]. That covers the farm sector (children 111, 112, and the farm side of 115), not forestry or fishing — but it is the cleanest read on how thin the margin is beneath the output number: over three dollars of expense for every dollar of income.

The undercount is the single most important caveat, and it runs one way — always understating. Every child is dominated by exactly the operators the payroll registers miss:

• Crops and animals (111, 112) are excluded outright and must be sized from USDA's Census of Agriculture — which counts farms, animals, acres, and value, not "firms" and "revenue." The producer base is overwhelmingly small, family-run, non-employer sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, and trusts, so any payroll lens reads near-zero — a coverage artifact, not an absent industry [3][4][8].
• Fishing (114) pays most crew by the "lay" (a share of the catch, not a wage) and is mostly self-employed owner-operators; the $404.1 million of fishing payroll in CBP sits against ~$5.1 billion of ex-vessel landings on 8.4 billion pounds in 2023. On the land side, the 446 hunting/trapping employer establishments compare with roughly 17,600 total businesses once sole proprietors are counted [6][17][18].
• Forestry & logging (113) counts 7,261 logging employer firms (of 7,917 subsector-wide) against an estimated ~43,000 logging businesses once sole proprietors are included — roughly six times as many — and ~$2.8B of payroll against ~$16B of delivered-wood revenue, plus ~3.7 million family forest owners and tens of billions in institutional timberland the payroll figure never sees [5][18][20].
• Support (115) captures ~11,886 employer firms and ~$5.9B of payroll against a single USDA farm-expense line — $10.05 billion of "customwork and custom hauling" across 391,283 farms — and private revenue estimates several times the payroll. Three further checks all point the same way: IBISWorld counts ~73,000 crop-services businesses against 5,072 employer establishments; industry estimates put working farriers above 25,000, more than the entire 23,365-employee count CBP reports for all of animal support; and where a broader federal series exists — BLS's industry-productivity measure for forestry support, which adds the unincorporated self-employed — it reports 26,700 jobs in 2025 against CBP's 15,361, about 1.6× [7][18][19]. The two series measure different things and no equivalent exists for the crop or animal children, so that ratio cannot be extended to a sector total.

The gap is small family, cooperative, and non-employer operations — never government ownership, and no suppressed cell should be read as zero. The honest way to size NAICS 11 is by acres, head, board-feet, pounds landed, and farm-gate value from USDA and NOAA — not from the business register, which sees only the formal, payrolled rim. The one firm-level federal business figure that does apply sector-wide is the U.S. Small Business Administration's (SBA) size standards — receipts ceilings that run from about $2.5 million for a beef ranch to $25 million for a finfish vessel, with dairy at $3.75M, hogs at $4.0M, hunting and trapping at $8.5M, forestry support at $11.5M, and a cattle feedlot at $22.0M (high only because feed passes through the yard as revenue) [27][3][4][6][7]; essentially every operator in the sector clears them, a direct statement of the structure: many operators, almost no giants.

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4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

Value in NAICS 11 concentrates in two places at once: in crop and animal farming by economic weight, and — for a public investor — almost entirely in the asset under the farm and the links around it, because the farms, ranches, boats, and forests themselves are private. The public universe is a menu of proxies, and a striking feature is how the same handful of names spans several children. Tickers are for identification, not recommendation.

The land-and-asset owners — the cleanest thread, spanning the most children.

• Farmland REITs — Gladstone Land (Nasdaq: LAND) and Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI) — own row-crop, orchard, vineyard, and specialty acreage leased to operators, collecting cash rent plus land (and water) appreciation. They are the cleanest listed way to own the asset under crop production (111) without direct crop-price risk, and they also anchor the diffuse land exposure investors reach for in animal grazing and support.
• Timberland REITs — now a duopoly. Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY), the largest U.S. timberland owner at ~10.4 million U.S. acres, and Rayonier (NYSE: RYN), enlarged by its ~$8.2 billion all-stock merger with PotlatchDeltic, which closed January 30, 2026 (combined ~4.1 million acres and six sawmills). PotlatchDeltic no longer trades separately; Acadian Timber (Toronto: ADN) is a small cross-border option. Neither REIT is a pure play — both also own wood-products mills. They own the forests of child 113, earn biological growth plus stumpage, and also earn hunting-lease income that is the nearest public read on child 114's hunting economics [5][7][23].

Input, equipment, and animal-health suppliers — sell into every child. Seed and crop protection via Corteva (NYSE: CTVA) and Bayer; fertilizer via Nutrien (NYSE: NTR), Mosaic (NYSE: MOS), CF Industries (NYSE: CF); machinery via Deere (NYSE: DE), CNH (NYSE: CNH), AGCO (NYSE: AGCO); animal health and genetics via Zoetis (NYSE: ZTS), Elanco (NYSE: ELAN), IDEXX (Nasdaq: IDXX), Neogen (Nasdaq: NEOG), and Genus plc (LSE: GNS) — the last the nearest listed operator in livestock genetics (child 115). These are broad agricultural-cycle plays, agnostic to which crop or animal pencils out [25].

Merchants, processors, and brands — the crop- and protein-specific listed exposure, one link downstream of the farm:

• Grain & oilseed: Archer-Daniels-Midland (NYSE: ADM), Bunge Global (NYSE: BG), The Andersons (Nasdaq: ANDE) — handling and crush margins that can widen when farm-gate prices are weak.
• Protein (the sector's best pure-plays): Tyson (NYSE: TSN) and JBS (NYSE: JBS) span beef, pork, and chicken under one ticker; Cal-Maine (Nasdaq: CALM) and Vital Farms (Nasdaq: VITL) for eggs; Pilgrim's Pride (Nasdaq: PPC) for chicken; Smithfield (Nasdaq: SFD) the one listed hog "farmer" (still ~91% controlled by WH Group, so the float is thin); Seaboard (NYSE American: SEB) and Hormel (NYSE: HRL) as diversified pork/turkey alternatives; Charles River (NYSE: CRL) the only scaled route into laboratory animals [4].
• Fruit, vegetable & other crop: Dole (NYSE: DOLE), Del Monte (NYSE: DMC), Mission Produce (Nasdaq: AVO), Lamb Weston (NYSE: LW), Seneca Foods (Nasdaq: SENEA), John B. Sanfilippo (Nasdaq: JBSS), Limoneira (Nasdaq: LMNR), Universal (NYSE: UVV), and foreign cane producers Adecoagro (NYSE: AGRO) and Cosan (NYSE: CSAN); the lone listed cultivators anywhere in the sector are outdoor-cannabis growers (Green Thumb, Trulieve, Glass House), carrying federal legal risk. Horticulture is reachable only through a holding-company window — Markel Group (NYSE: MKL), owner of ~81% of Costa Farms — plus channel and input names Central Garden & Pet (Nasdaq: CENT), SiteOne (NYSE: SITE), BrightView (NYSE: BV), Scotts Miracle-Gro (NYSE: SMG), and 1-800-Flowers (Nasdaq: FLWS) [3].
• Forestry & fishing downstream: wood-products and packaging (Louisiana-Pacific LPX, Boise Cascade BCC, West Fraser WFG, International Paper IP, Packaging Corp PKG) for the mills the loggers feed; seafood processors and brands (High Liner, Thai Union, Dongwon, Premium Brands), distributors (Sysco, US Foods), and foreign farmed-salmon majors (Mowi, SalMar, Lerøy, Bakkafrost, Grieg) for the fishing theme; Rollins (NYSE: ROL) for consolidated nuisance-wildlife control in hunting [5][6].
• Support niche — the sector's newest direct exposure: Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM), effectively the sole supplier of long-term wildfire retardant to the U.S. Forest Service on a contract valued near $1.12 billion, and Bridger Aerospace (Nasdaq: BAER), a listed aerial-firefighting operator that genuinely performs child-115 work — but with $122.8 million of 2025 revenue and 87% of it from three customers, it is a narrow, fire-season-dependent bet, not a proxy for the support layer [7][24]. The near-pure nursery play, ArborGen (NZX: ARB) — ~27% of the U.S. South's merchant seedling market — is an illiquid foreign micro-cap [5].

Commodity & fund routes — deep for grain, thin-to-absent elsewhere. Single-crop grain funds Teucrium Corn (CORN), Soybean (SOYB), Wheat (WEAT), and Sugar (CANE — the world, not U.S., price); the broad basket Invesco DB Agriculture (DBA); the agribusiness exchange-traded fund (ETF — a basket of stocks that trades like a share) VanEck Agribusiness (MOO); the iPath livestock note (COW); CME Group live-cattle, feeder-cattle, and lean-hog futures; ICE cotton and orange-juice contracts. Forestry ETFs do exist (WOOD, CUT) but hold mostly forest-products manufacturers, so they are a diluted proxy for the child rather than exposure to timberland [5]. There is still no fishing, aquaculture, sheep, or goat fund, and no fund tilted to any single livestock species — a sharp access gap.

Where the real ownership sits (private / cooperative). The operating layer of every child: family farms and ranches; private trading and processing giants (Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, Smithfield's WH Group parent, McCain, Simplot, The Wonderful Company, Cooke Aquaculture, Pacific Seafood, Taylor Shellfish); grower and farmer cooperatives (CHS, Dairy Farmers of America, Sunkist, Blue Diamond, Ocean Spray); the genetics duopolies and consolidators (Aviagen/Cobb-Vantress in poultry; Select Sires, STgenetics, URUS, Hendrix in cattle); scarce processing capacity (employee-owned Superior Farms handles roughly a third of inspected lamb); forestry-services roll-ups (American Forest Management, more than 5.7 million acres under management); institutional farmland and timberland managers (Nuveen Natural Capital, Manulife, Farmers National) and Timber Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs — professional managers who run forests for pensions and endowments); fractional-farmland platforms (AcreTrader, FarmTogether); fishing vessels plus their catch quota; and the Texas exotic-game and deer-breeding cluster. Direct ownership of the land, timber, quota, or water is the oldest and truest route to the economics below [26][7].

The practical takeaway: public equity captures none of the five children cleanly, the cleanest routes are the asset owners rather than the operators, and a bull on corn, on beef, on farmed salmon, and on timber buys entirely different (and often inverse or foreign) names.

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5. How the money works

Despite the sprawl, most of NAICS 11 runs on one recurring shape — saleable biological output × a price the operator does not set, minus input, land/feed, labor, and financing cost, plus any government support and downstream margin the owner can capture — layered on top of biological inventory on a clock the operator cannot rush. This is a farm, real-asset, and resource sector: do not force regulated-utility rate base, REIT funds-from-operations, or mining all-in-sustaining-cost language onto it. The appropriate metrics are yield and quality per acre/head/square foot, realized price versus break-even, feed-conversion and crush spreads, packout and shrink, cash rent and net return per acre, quota and land value, water security, and debt-to-asset ratio.

What differs is what the big cost is and who keeps the margin:

• Crop production (111) — a thin spread on land. Revenue is acres × yield × price plus insurance and government payments; cost is dominated by fertilizer, land rent, seed, and chemicals (labor small in grain, ~40% in tree crops, ~37% in horticulture). The margin is currently thin-to-negative in grain, propped by federal backstops [3].
• Animal production (112) — a "crush" margin on a breeding clock. The value of the finished animal or product minus the feed and young stock that went into it. Feed (corn, soybean meal) is half or more of confined-species cost; the exceptions (cow-calf, sheep, shellfish) run on forage or filter-feed and buy little. Integrators own the animals and book profit downstream while contract growers carry the barns; independents own their herds and keep the price risk [4].
• Forestry & logging (113) — the crop grows itself. Timberland's unusual engine is biological growth: trees add volume and cross value thresholds from pulpwood to chip-n-saw to sawtimber every year, so the asset appreciates whether or not you cut, and an owner can "store timber on the stump" when prices are weak. Cash comes from stumpage (selling standing trees) plus hunting, mineral, solar, and carbon leases; logging itself is a thin diesel-and-iron cut-and-haul spread. The private-market scorecard, the NCREIF Timberland Index, has run about 10.7% annualized since 1987 with low volatility and a positive inflation correlation [5][20].
• Fishing & hunting (114) — a capped resource and a scarce-land service. Fishing is pounds × ex-vessel price, with volume fixed by regulation and nature, so the only way to grow is to buy or lease more catch quota — which makes the harvesting right a balance-sheet asset often worth more than the boat. Hunting is a scarce-land recreation-and-services business — per-hunter revenue against a short season, plus hunting-lease income of roughly $5–$50+ per acre a year and growing paid nuisance-wildlife control [6][17].
• Support activities (115) — fee, utilization, and IP. Three models: fixed-cost processing (gins, packing houses, firefighting aircraft) that lives on utilization of an expensive asset in a short season; labor-and-time contracting (crews, planters, shearers) priced per acre/animal/day/gallon with standby and mobilization on top; and asset-light fee/IP intermediation (farm management, forestry consulting, and — most distinctively — livestock genetics, a razor-and-blades recurring-revenue business with an R&D moat). Genetics and data scale because they own proprietary information; labor services are capped by hours and route density [7].

Two profit streams — the operating margin and the asset — run through every child. Operators earn the thin, volatile production margin; owners earn rent plus appreciation on land, timberland, or quota — and U.S. cropland hit a record ~$5,830 per acre in 2025, up 4.7%, even as crop prices fell [11]. The split is now institutional: about 40% of U.S. farmland is rented and ~79% of rented farmland is owned by non-farmers, which is also why professional farm management is one of the growing corners of child 115 [12][7]. That split is why public investors (mostly asset owners via REITs) and operators experience the sector very differently, and why the cleanest listed proxy for most children is a land or timberland REIT rather than an operating company.

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6. Demand drivers

Demand runs through a handful of channels — food, feed, fiber, fuel, construction, exports, recreation, and public budgets — but the mix differs sharply by child, which is why the five do not move together:

• Food and protein demand — the base load. Staple crops, meat, milk, eggs, and seafood ride population, income, and diet shifts; chicken (the cheapest protein) is the structural share-gainer, and "better-for-you" categories (berries, nuts, avocados) grow within crops.
• Feed and the livestock herd. Corn and soybean meal are the master input for confined animals; hay and pasture track a cattle herd at a multi-decade low — a demand link inside the sector connecting crops to animals, and also the reason animal-support demand is shifting toward premium genetics on fewer head [4][7].
• Biofuel — the biggest cross-cutting tailwind, concentrated in grain. Federal mandates pull corn into ethanol and soybean/canola oil into renewable diesel [14][3]; this is the single largest demand lever in the sector, and it barely touches the specialty, animal, forestry, or fishing children.
• Housing and construction — the master swing for timber. Most U.S. softwood lumber and structural panel demand ties to homebuilding and remodeling, so housing starts and mortgage rates drive sawtimber, logging volume, and (with a lag) seedling orders. Packaging and tissue give pulpwood a steadier pull, though a structurally shrinking U.S. pulp-and-paper base is weighing on Southern pulpwood prices [5].
• Public budgets — the demand curve for forestry support. Federal reforestation money (the REPLANT Act uncapped the Reforestation Trust Fund against a backlog of more than 4 million acres, with the Forest Service completing over 231,000 acres in fiscal 2024) and wildfire suppression spending averaging roughly $3 billion a year (~$3.2 billion in 2023) drive child 115's fastest-growing corner directly; carbon-inventory work adds a new measurement demand [7][21].
• Exports and trade — the sharpest swing factor. The U.S. exports much of its soybeans, cotton, almonds, pork (~25% of output, a record $8.63 billion in 2024), broilers (~14%), and pollock; China is the pivotal buyer of soybeans and sorghum; tariffs and the dollar reprice farm-gate and dockside prices overnight [3][4].
• Import substitution and penetration. Aquaculture and wild fishing sit against ~80% imported seafood and a ~$20.3 billion trade deficit — a structural tailwind for domestic fish; meanwhile year-round produce and cut-flower imports pressure domestic crop prices [4][6].
• Discretionary and recreation. Nursery stock tracks housing and landscaping; floriculture is pure gifting; guided hunting is luxury recreation against a slowly shrinking hunter base (~15.9 million paid license-holders in 2021), while rising urban wildlife conflict lifts paid nuisance-wildlife removal — the clearest growth corner in child 114 [6].
• Labor scarcity is a demand driver in its own right: a shrinking, aging farm and forest workforce pushes work out to labor contractors and toward automation, which is why farm-labor contracting and farm management are the growing halves of child 115 even as custom harvest and cotton ginning shrink [7].

The forces to watch sector-wide: federal biofuel policy (a single rule moves a large slice of grain demand), trade/China (reprices soybeans, cotton, pork, nuts), housing and rates (timber and nursery), federal appropriations (reforestation, fire, and the farm safety net), and weather — the universal wild card that can cut output across every child at once.

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7. Regulation

NAICS 11 is lightly regulated as a business but heavily shaped by federal and state resource, farm, trade, food-safety, and labor policy — and in this sector, uniquely, government sets the supply curve itself for several children (catch limits, timber sales, wildlife seasons, planted-acre programs). The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the master agency; the common stack:

• The Farm Bill safety net. USDA's Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage (ARC/PLC) set price/revenue floors for commodity crops; the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) raised reference prices [13]. Fruit, vegetables, and horticulture are treated as "specialty crops" largely outside these programs — same sector, two relationships with Washington.
• Federal crop and livestock insurance (USDA Risk Management Agency) — the single largest support mechanism, near-universal across crops and a growing tool in livestock.
• Disease and biosecurity — the master shared regulatory front. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) runs the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and the H5N1 strain now in poultry and dairy cattle, plus quarantines against Huanglongbing (HLB, "citrus greening"), New World screwworm, scrapie, and chronic wasting disease, and controls live-animal and germplasm (semen/embryo) movement that child 115's genetics businesses depend on [15][4][7]. A single outbreak can vaporize biological inventory.
• Labor and immigration — the biggest cost lever for the labor-intensive children, and now a moving target. The Department of Labor's H-2A (seasonal farm) visa program and its Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) govern the hand-harvest workforce — and the AEWR methodology changed effective October 2, 2025, reshaping crop and animal labor cost and remaining a live policy fight. The H-2B program (seasonal non-farm, used for reforestation) has a 66,000 statutory cap that is hit every year but is now frequently supplemented — roughly 64,700 additional visas were released for fiscal 2026 — so tree-planting capacity turns on a discretionary annual decision as much as on the statute [16][3][7].
• Resource management sets supply. Fishing is capped by the Magnuson-Stevens Act and NOAA's regional catch limits, with tradable catch shares (Individual Fishing Quota) making "quota" an asset [17]; hunting is set by state wildlife agencies, which can eliminate a whole segment (California's Wildlife Protection Act of 2019 banned commercial fur trapping outright); Forest Service timber-sale policy swings regional log supply; state forest-practice acts in Oregon, Washington, and California mandate post-harvest reforestation, effectively guaranteeing nursery and planting demand; and the EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) sets biofuel volumes [6][5][7][14].
• Water — the binding western constraint. California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is curtailing Central Valley pumping; Colorado River and Ogallala politics bind rice, Western hay, and cotton [3].
• Food safety, environment, and market conduct. FDA produce-safety and shellfish rules and USDA meat inspection (FSIS) downstream — a shortage of small inspected plants is a real constraint for lamb, goat, and aquaculture producers; EPA permitting of large feeding operations (CAFOs) and silviculture, plus the Agricultural Worker Protection Standard and OSHA's logging standard (29 CFR 1910.266); USDA's Packers and Stockyards Act on livestock-contract fairness; and state animal-welfare sales laws (California's Proposition 12, upheld in 2023) that reset hog and egg economics nationally. Dairy has its own price-setting machinery in the Federal Milk Marketing Order, overhauled in June 2025 [4][7].

Net: policy is a source of stability and modest upside for commodity crops and animals, a source of cost and constraint (labor, water, food safety, catch cuts) for specialty and wild-harvest children, a direct revenue source for forestry support, and a dependency across the board — a large share of farm income is transfer payments, not market income, and a weaker safety net would expose the thin underlying margins.

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8. Consolidation

The structural signature is identical across all five children: fragmented at the point of production, concentrated in the middle — a barbell. No farm, ranch, boat, or logging crew has pricing power over its output, so the competitive game is cost, scale, and control of a scarce asset (land, water, quota, genetics, or processing/buyer access).

• The production base is fragmenting slowly upward but stays dispersed: the midpoint corn farm grew from 200 acres (1987) to 685 (2017) and large farms' share of cropland rose from 15% to 41% [28], dairy herds are down ~65% since 2004, hog farms down >70% since 1990, logging firms thinning ~1.8% a year — yet millions of small operators remain. Note the one visible counter-current: the biggest hog players are partly deconsolidating the farming step, deeding sows back to independent growers to focus on branded packaged meat [4].
• The middle is highly concentrated: the Big Four beef packers handle ~85% of steer/heifer slaughter; the "ABCD" grain traders plus CHS dominate grain; four processors control ~97% of frozen potatoes; broiler top-four run ~55–60%, egg top-ten ~54%, with a 72–78% poultry-genetics duopoly; timberland has consolidated to essentially two listed REITs after the Rayonier–PotlatchDeltic merger closed January 30, 2026; fishing quota accumulates into fewer hands; and inside support, livestock genetics is consolidating into a handful of players while long-term fire retardant is effectively a single-supplier market and forestry consulting has produced roll-ups such as American Forest Management (5.7 million-plus acres managed). Producers buy from concentrated sellers and sell to concentrated buyers, squeezed from both ends — now drawing intensified antitrust scrutiny (a DOJ beef-packing probe; a 2026 DOJ action on poultry data exchange; frozen-potato price-fixing litigation) [3][4][5][7][23][28].
• Consolidation on the customer side matters too. The same timberland merger leaves logging crews, planting contractors, and consulting foresters selling into a smaller set of larger institutional landowners — fewer, bigger contracts and more counterparty concentration for the private operators who win them [7].
• "Bigger but fewer" is measurable in the service layer: USDA ERS finds inflation-adjusted receipts for agricultural support services rose 263% from 1978 to 2022 while the number of active establishments fell 10% [29].
• A slow financialization separates ownership from operation: farmland and timberland REITs, TIMOs, and pension funds buying and leasing back the land and forests, and quota trading turning the right to fish into a capital asset.

A crucial distinction for investors: consolidation of market channels (merchants controlling the pipes), of asset ownership (a landlord or fund accumulating acres, timber, or quota), and of operation (a large farm) are three different things, often three different parties — and the margin belongs to whoever controls the scarce asset. In forestry support, uniquely, government is simultaneously the biggest customer and a direct competitor, insourcing or outsourcing crews by budget and politics.

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9. Risks

The risk stack is largely shared across the sector, with different emphasis by child:

• Price / margin cyclicality — the dominant risk. Thin-to-negative operating margins are the base case across grain and much of animal production; gluts recur in fruit, vegetables, and hogs; a big harvest or catch can depress prices even when volume is good [3][4].
• Disease and biosecurity — the master shared risk in living inventory. H5N1 has hit 1,000-plus dairy herds since 2024 and destroyed 166 million-plus birds since 2022; HLB in citrus has no cure; African Swine Fever abroad, New World screwworm advancing through Mexico, chronic wasting disease, colony collapse in bees, and Vibrio/algal kills in shellfish round it out. Biological inventory can vanish suddenly and breeder stock takes a year-plus to rebuild [4][15].
• Weather, water, and climate. Drought, flood, freeze, heat, wildfire, and marine heatwaves can wipe out a season; water is existential for California specialty crops, and a warming ocean has already forced fishery closures — the Bering Sea snow-crab harvest was cancelled for the first time ever after an ~80% collapse [3][6].
• Trade and export shocks. China as pivotal soybean/sorghum buyer; tariffs on nuts, pork, and cotton; Russian seafood oversupply; and softwood-lumber duties near ~35% plus a 10% Section 232 tariff from October 2025 that supports domestic log prices while raising builder costs — a policy that can reverse [3][4][5][6].
• Input-cost squeeze. Fertilizer (tied to natural gas), feed, fuel, seed, rent, energy, and interest can rise faster than output prices — with 2026 farm production expenses forecast at a record ~$477.7 billion [10].
• Policy and public-budget dependence. A large share of farm income is transfer payments (ARC/PLC + insurance + ad-hoc aid); any Farm Bill, biofuel, catch-limit, or trade change reprices the affected child. In forestry support the risk goes further: appropriations set the size of the market and the customer must be able to administer the contracts — the GAO found Forest Service work constrained by staffing, with the agency's workforce down about 20% during fiscal 2025 and some forest-program vacancy rates above 40% [22][7].
• Labor and immigration — H-2A/H-2B wage and availability risk hits the biggest cost line in the labor-intensive children, and the H-2B supplement is a discretionary annual decision [16].
• Occupational safety. Logging is the most dangerous occupation in America — a fatality rate around 110 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers in 2024, roughly 33× the national average — and commercial fishing is among the deadliest U.S. jobs; both are real operating and insurance risks [19][5][6].
• Capital intensity and illiquidity. High establishment costs and long paybacks (perennial plantings, greenhouses at ~$1–3 million an acre, timber, barns, vessels) are unforgiving when weak prices, poor output, and high rates coincide [3].
• Public-market mismatch — the investor-specific risk. Nearly every listed proxy is diversified far beyond any one child (or is a price fund carrying futures roll cost, or a foreign/inverse proxy), so the shares are poor short-term reads on primary economics. The exception carries the opposite problem: the one small operator that genuinely performs support work, Bridger Aerospace, took 87% of 2025 revenue from three customers and swings with fire-season severity. Private-company opacity plus five-year census cycles make market size, share, and valuations genuinely hard to verify [5][6][7][24].

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10. How to invest & outlook

Decide which economic link you want first — the asset (land, timberland, quota), the operation (the farm, ranch, boat, or forest), or the supply chain (inputs, merchants, processors, services) — because they pay off differently and often in opposite directions.

Public routes (indirect, liquid):

1. Land and timberland REITs (LAND, FPI, WY, RYN; ADN as a small cross-border option) — the cleanest listed handles to the sector's assets: own the land or forest, collect rent or stumpage, ride appreciation. Review net asset value, funds from operations (the REIT cash-flow measure), rent or inventory coverage, tenant quality, owned-versus-managed acres, debt per acre, and — critically — water rights (farmland) and inventory age, sawtimber-versus-pulpwood mix, and mill access (timber). Closest to an owner's return; the link to any single crop or animal is loose, and both timber REITs also carry wood-products manufacturing [5][23].
2. Input, equipment & animal-health suppliers (CTVA, NTR, MOS, CF, DE, CNH, AGCO, ZTS, ELAN, NEOG, IDXX, GNS) — broad agricultural-cycle exposure driven by planted acres, herd size, farm income, and the replacement cycle.
3. Merchants, processors & protein pure-plays (ADM, BG, ANDE, TSN, JBS, CALM, VITL, PPC, SFD, SEB, HRL, CRL, LW, DOLE, DMC, AVO, MKL) — the only near-clean operating equities (clustered in poultry, eggs, hogs, and lab animals) plus the merchant/processor margin, often counter-cyclical to farm margins.
4. Downstream and niche proxies (LPX, BCC, WFG, IP, PKG for timber; Mowi/SalMar/Bakkafrost and Sysco/US Foods for fishing; ROL for nuisance-wildlife; PRM and BAER for the two listed forestry-support operators) and commodity funds (CORN, SOYB, WEAT, CANE, DBA, MOO, COW; CME cattle/hog futures; ICE cotton/FCOJ) — deep for the grain and livestock complex; forestry funds (WOOD, CUT) hold manufacturers rather than forests, and there is still no fishing, aquaculture, or single-species livestock fund.

Private routes (direct, illiquid) — where nearly all the real ownership sits: owning cropland, timberland, a herd, a vessel-plus-quota, or the water and leasing to an operator; farmland and timberland funds, TIMO separate accounts benchmarked to the NCREIF Timberland Index, and fractional platforms; operating a farm, ranch, feedlot, orchard, greenhouse, or fishing business; grain-storage, packing, cold-chain, or processing infrastructure; cooperative membership; or the genetics, custom-service, reforestation, and wildland-fire "picks-and-shovels" layer, where aging-owner independents in soil prep, labor contracting, farm management, farriery, and forestry consulting are a labor-constrained roll-up opportunity [7]. These capture the two returns that matter most — the operating margin and rent plus appreciation. Diligence the asset itself: title and lease terms, water and quota rights first, soil, yield/packout/harvest history, disease and indemnity history, buyer/tenant quality, permit and lease standing, insurance, succession, working capital, and an exit value grounded in both cash flow and asset value. Note that some fishing allocations (Community Development Quota and much cooperative allocation) are simply not open to outside investors [6].

Near-term outlook (a judgment, not a forecast). Read NAICS 11 as five clocks running at once, over a shared foundation of weak operating margins offset by strong asset values:

• Crops — commodity-grain economics are the poorest in years, propped by ARC/PLC, insurance, and OBBBA reference prices; specialty crops squeezed by labor, water, and imports; biofuel the one big tailwind [3].
• Animals — cattle at a genuine 75-year scarcity peak (86.2 million head, rewarding ranchers who own animals, squeezing feeders who must buy them, with no meaningful herd rebuild before ~2028); poultry a structurally growing, bird-flu-whipsawed complex with the sector's best public access; hogs mature and export-sensitive with majors shifting risk toward packaged meat; aquaculture a compelling import-substitution story at tiny scale [4].
• Forestry — soft near-term on elevated mortgage rates and structurally weak Southern pulpwood, with a long-term bull case in a housing recovery, biological growth, reforestation demand, mass timber, and carbon [5].
• Fishing & hunting — fishing supply-capped and price-pressured while Russian product persists, value concentrating in quota ownership and vertical integration; hunting two-speed, with nuisance-wildlife control the steadiest grower and the only corner attracting institutional capital [6].
• Support — bifurcated: premium livestock genetics up on record cattle economics and the beef-on-dairy/sexed-semen shift; crop services under pressure from a soft farm economy; forestry support structurally rising on reforestation and fire budgets but constrained on two fronts at once — H-2B visa availability and federal agency staffing [7][22].

Across all five, the medium-term backdrop favors the asset owner over the operator — rents and land, timber, and quota values kept rising even as output prices fell — and the sharpest swing factors are biofuel mandates, trade/China, housing and rates, federal appropriations, and disease (H5N1 above all).

Bottom line. NAICS 11 is the whole primary land-and-water economy — on the order of half a trillion-plus dollars of output a year — but it is radically lopsided and radically hard to buy: crop and animal farming are ~96% of the money and almost entirely private; the official business register captures only the ~$9-billion support-and-harvest rim and misses the two giants completely; and the cleanest listed exposure is the land, timberland, and quota under the sector, or the merchants, processors, and specialist service operators around it, not the farms themselves. The right question for any deal is which scarce asset captures the margin — land, water, quota, genetics, or processing capacity — and whether you are being paid for the risk attached to it. For the complete analysis of any child, read its primer.

For full detail see the five child primers: 111 Crop Production, 112 Animal Production and Aquaculture, 113 Forestry and Logging, 114 Fishing, Hunting and Trapping, and 115 Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry.

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Sources

This rollup synthesizes the five child primers (NAICS 111, 112, 113, 114, 115) plus our ground-truth federal statistics file for NAICS 11. That file — U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023 — contains four metrics for the sector (establishments 22,752; employees 161,334; annual payroll $9,180,464 thousand; Q1 payroll $2,017,191 thousand) and, because crop and animal production are excluded from CBP, captures only children 113/114/115; it sums to those three exactly on all four metrics. The ingested files for 111 and 112 contain no metrics at all. Every output/farm-gate figure is USDA, NOAA, SBA, BLS, GAO, IBISWorld, or company data carried up from the children, labeled by source, and is not an audited sector total. Numbering is this page's own.

1. U.S. Census Bureau / Office of Management and Budget, 2022 NAICS Manual — Sector 11 (Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting) and subsectors 111–115 (scope, definitions, exclusions). https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023 — NAICS 11 and subsectors (our ingested ground-truth: 22,752 establishments; 161,334 employees; $9,180,464K annual and $2,017,191K Q1 payroll) and CBP Methodology (employer-only coverage; excludes the self-employed, non-EIN sole proprietors, and most government; crop 111 and animal 112 production excluded by design, as they are from the Economic Census, SUSB, Nonemployer Statistics, and BLS QCEW). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
3. Histometrics child primer 111 — Crop Production, synthesizing USDA NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture crop highlights (grain/oilseed ~$168.7B on ~69% of harvested cropland; vegetables ~$28.2B, 69,452 farms; fruit/nut/berry ~$34.2B, 110,821 farms, 6.56M acres, 93% family), the 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties (~$18.3B, 23,060 operations, ~249,000 hired workers, labor ~37% of expenses), an other-crop farm-gate rollup (~$35B), crop-value rollups (~$285B indicative), and company filings. Ingested federal stats file for NAICS 111 is empty.
4. Histometrics child primer 112 — Animal Production and Aquaculture, synthesizing USDA ERS 2024 cash receipts (cattle/calves $112.1B = 41.7% of animal-product receipts; milk $50.7B; ~$270B implied), USDA NASS poultry/egg production value (~$70.2B), hog receipts (~$27–31B), USDA NASS livestock inventories (86.2M cattle; 73.7M hogs; 9.33B broilers; 365M layers; 7.5M sheep and goats), the 2023 Census of Aquaculture ($1.908B, 3,453 farms), and Tyson/JBS/Cal-Maine/Smithfield/Seaboard/Hormel/Charles River filings. Ingested federal stats file for NAICS 112 contains no metrics.
5. Histometrics child primer 113 — Forestry and Logging, synthesizing Census CBP 2023 (7,917 establishments; 47,629 employees; ~$2.81B payroll; ~$59,000 average pay; children 1131/1132/1133 reconciling exactly), IBISWorld logging (~$16B revenue; ~43,000 businesses; no firm >5% share; ~1.8%/yr decline), Forisk timberland-owner data (~40M REIT/TIMO acres), the NCREIF Timberland Index, and Weyerhaeuser / Rayonier / Acadian / ArborGen disclosures.
6. Histometrics child primer 114 — Fishing, Hunting and Trapping, synthesizing Census CBP 2023 (2,949 establishments; 6,615 employees; $497.6M payroll; fishing 2,503/4,581/$404.1M at ~$88,000 average pay, hunting 446/2,034/$93.5M at ~$46,000), NOAA Fisheries of the United States 2023 ($5.1B ex-vessel on 8.4B lb), IBISWorld hunting/trapping (~$1.2B; ~17,600 businesses), and USFWS participation data (14.4M hunters; ~15.9M license-holders).
7. Histometrics child primer 115 — Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry, synthesizing Census CBP 2023 (11,886 establishments; 107,090 employees; ~$5.875B payroll; children 1151/1152/1153 at ~65%/~18%/~17% of payroll), IBISWorld crop and forest services (~$32B / ~$3.5B), USDA 2022 Census customwork line ($10.05B across 391,283 farms), BLS/FRED forestry-support employment, and Genus / Perimeter Solutions / Bridger Aerospace / American Forest Management disclosures.
8. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), 2022 Census of Agriculture (farm counts, acreage, structure, production expenses; the authoritative source that replaces the excluded business registers for crops and animals). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
9. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), Cash Receipts by Commodity, 2024 (cattle/calves $112.1B = 41.7% of animal-product receipts; milk $50.7B). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-income-and-wealth-statistics/annual-cash-receipts-by-commodity
10. USDA ERS, Farm Sector Income Forecast (2026 net farm income ~$153.4B; record production expenses ~$477.7B; soft crop margins 2025–2026). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-sector-income-finances/farm-sector-income-forecast
11. USDA NASS, Land Values 2025 Summary (U.S. cropland ~$5,830/acre, +4.7%). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/2025LandValuesCashRents_FINAL.pdf
12. USDA NASS, Most of the U.S. Rented Farmland is Owned by Non-Farmers (~79%); USDA ERS, Farmland Ownership and Tenure (~40% of U.S. farmland rented). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2026/03-12-2026.php
13. USDA Farm Service Agency, Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) & Price Loss Coverage (PLC); USDA Risk Management Agency, Federal Crop Insurance; 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) reference-price increases. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
14. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS); 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit. https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard
15. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), HPAI / H5N1 response and indemnity; Citrus Greening (HLB); New World screwworm; National Scrapie Eradication Program; Chronic Wasting Disease; live-animal and germplasm movement rules. https://www.aphis.usda.gov
16. U.S. Department of Labor, H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program (Adverse Effect Wage Rate; methodology change effective October 2, 2025); U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants (66,000 statutory cap; ~64,700 supplemental visas released for FY2026). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a; https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants
17. NOAA Fisheries, Fisheries of the United States, 2023 ($5.1B ex-vessel on 8.4B lb); Magnuson-Stevens Act (200-nm EEZ; eight regional councils; annual catch limits); Catch Shares (IFQ / cooperative quota as a tradable asset). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/sustainable-fisheries/fisheries-united-states; https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/laws-policies/magnuson-stevens-act; https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/catch-shares
18. IBISWorld industry reports: Logging in the US (~$16.1B revenue; ~43,000 businesses; no firm >5% share; ~1.8%/yr establishment decline); Hunting & Trapping in the US (~$1.2B; ~17,600 businesses); Crop Services in the US (~$32B; ~73,000 businesses); Forest Support Services in the US (~$3.5B, 2024). https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/logging/78/; https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/hunting-trapping/86/; https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/crop-services/89/; https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/forest-support-services-united-states/
19. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024 (logging fatality rate ~110 per 100,000 FTE; ~33× the national average); BLS Industry Productivity Series via FRED, NAICS 115310 employment (24,200 in 2023; 25,500 in 2024; 26,700 in 2025, including unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers). https://www.bls.gov/iif/; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUAN115310W200000000
20. Forisk Consulting, North America's Top Timberland Owners and Managers, 2025 Update (~40M acres held/managed by REITs and TIMOs); Nuveen, Timberland Market Review (NCREIF Timberland Index ~10.7% annualized since 1987, low volatility, positive inflation correlation); USDA Forest Service, National Woodland Owner Survey Dashboard (~3.7M family owners). https://forisk.com/north-americas-top-timberland-owners-and-managers-2025-update/; https://documents.nuveen.com/Documents/Nuveen/Viewer.aspx?uniqueId=0ada740b-2b56-4176-8726-84659f1bcd81
21. USDA Forest Service, Reforestation and the REPLANT Act (uncapped Reforestation Trust Fund, ~$123M/yr; >4-million-acre backlog; 231,000 acres reforested in FY2024); USDA Forest Service Research & Development / National Interagency Fire Center, Government spending on wildfire suppression (~$3B annual average; ~$3.2B in 2023). https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/vegetation-management/reforestation; https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs/articles/government-spending-wildfire-suppression-rises-climate-change
22. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Forest Management workforce and capacity review, GAO-26-107993, 2026 (Forest Service workforce down ~20% during FY2025; some forest-program vacancy rates above 40%). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107993
23. Rayonier Inc., Form 8-K announcing completion of the PotlatchDeltic merger of equals, January 30, 2026 (~$8.2B; combined ~4.1 million acres, six sawmills); Weyerhaeuser Company, Form 10-K FY2025 (~10.4 million U.S. acres). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/52827/000119312526032194/d63429d8k.htm; https://investor.weyerhaeuser.com/
24. Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings (Nasdaq: BAER), Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 ($122.8M revenue; 87% of revenue from three customers); ExecutiveBiz / Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM), USDA Awards $1.12B Retardant Contract to Perimeter Solutions. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1941536/000194153626000005/baer-20251231.htm; https://www.executivebiz.com/articles/usda-perimeter-solutions-fire-retardant-contract-award
25. Company filings for the investable-universe names (ADM, BG, ANDE, CTVA, NTR, MOS, CF, DE, CNH, AGCO, ZTS, ELAN, IDXX, NEOG, Genus; TSN, JBS, CALM, VITL, PPC, SFD, SEB, HRL, CRL; DOLE, DMC, AVO, LW, SENEA, JBSS, LMNR, UVV, AGRO, CSAN, MKL, CENT, SITE, BV, SMG, FLWS; LPX, BCC, WFG, IP, PKG; Mowi, SalMar, Lerøy, Bakkafrost, Grieg; Rollins). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar
26. Farmland and timberland owners and managers: Gladstone Land (Nasdaq: LAND), Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI), Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY), Rayonier (NYSE: RYN) Form 10-Ks; Cargill; Nuveen Natural Capital; Manulife Investment Management; Farmers National Company; AcreTrader; FarmTogether; American Forest Management (>5.7 million acres under management). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar; https://www.americanforestmanagement.com/about-us
27. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards Matched to NAICS Codes (receipts thresholds across Sector 11: beef ranching $2.5M; dairy $3.75M; hogs $4.0M; crops ~$2–5M; hunting/trapping 114210 $8.5M; forestry support 115310 $11.5M; cattle feedlots $22.0M; finfish fishing 114111 $25M), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
28. USDA Economic Research Service, Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming (ERR-152) and Three Decades of Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture (midpoint corn farm 200→685 acres; large-farm cropland share 15%→41%); USDA ERS meatpacking-concentration analysis (Big Four beef packers ~85%). https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/8660/err-152.pdf
29. USDA Economic Research Service, The Growing Contribution of Support Services to U.S. Agricultural Production (inflation-adjusted ag-services receipts +263% 1978–2022 while establishments fell 10%). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/109259