Agricultural share of land, 2023
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Cultivated crops and pasture/hay, divided by town area excluding mapped open water. UConn / CT ECO summaries of USGS Annual NLCD.
Agricultural land and agricultural employment, compared separately across Connecticut's 169 towns.
A town can have working farms, a farming history, and an economy in which few residents work in agriculture. This page measures land cover and employment separately. It does not assign an official "farming community" label.
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Cultivated crops and pasture/hay, divided by town area excluding mapped open water. UConn / CT ECO summaries of USGS Annual NLCD.
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Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting as a share of employed residents age 16+. ACS five-year estimates; includes work outside town and self-employment.
Do agricultural acreage and employment tell the same story?
Each dot is one town. Farther right means more agricultural land; higher means a larger estimated share of residents working in the sector.
Land: 2023 Annual NLCD. Employment: 2020-2024 ACS C24030. Hollow dots mark employment estimates whose interval includes zero or whose margin of error is unavailable. The selected town's vertical line shows its approximate 90% interval. Data and source definitions.
Neighbors share a border in the project's town roster. The rank shown is the statewide land-share rank, with 1 meaning lowest.
Rank 1 is the lowest share. Equal unrounded values share a rank. Employment ranks order survey estimates; small differences often cannot be distinguished from sampling error. A reported zero is an estimate, not proof that nobody works in the sector.
The historical workplace comparison uses the project's CT DOL QCEW file, which ends in 2016. It counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance, including inbound commuters, and excludes self-employed people and some farm employment.
Missing industry rows may be suppressed. They are not zero and cannot receive a statewide rank. The historical table ranks only towns with disclosed values. Newer CT DOL figures require a separate collection; these historical values are not current employment counts.
CT DOL town QCEW source. NAICS 11 includes agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting. The 2013 figures are separate context and never fill a 2016 gap.
Agricultural land share is mapped agricultural acres divided by total mapped town acres minus mapped open-water acres. Wetlands remain in the denominator. The collector checks all 169 canonical town names, reconciles the eight land-cover categories to full town area, and checks its total-area percentage against the publisher's percentage. These are source consistency checks, not an independent farm survey.
Resident industry share adds the male and female agriculture/forestry/fishing/hunting estimates in ACS table C24030 and divides by all civilian employed residents age 16+. Margins of error use the Census approximation for a sum followed by a subset proportion, with the ratio fallback if needed. Intervals are clipped to 0-100%. A low-precision flag appears when the margin of error is at least the estimate, the estimate is zero, or uncertainty is unavailable. Other estimates still have sampling error.
The statewide medians give each town equal weight. They are not Connecticut's combined land or worker share. Land ranks use mapped estimates without a town-specific error interval; ACS ranks describe point estimates and do not establish statistical differences. We do not combine the measures into a score or set an arbitrary threshold for a "farming community."
To measure farm businesses and production directly, add an active-farm inventory and PA 490 farmland acres separated from forest and open space. Farm counts must distinguish operations from parcels and account for farms using land in several towns. USDA's standard Census of Agriculture county figures cannot establish a town's share.