Methods for Identifying the Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing Workforce Population - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 294

Table E-3 presents the EEO Occupational 1990 and 2000 tabulations for AFF
occupational categories. It is important to note that the findings regarding hired
farm laborers likely reflect a substantial undercount. Moreover, self-employed fam-
ily workers are not represented in the table, because they do not correspond to an
officially recognized occupation.

CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY

The CPS is a monthly survey of about 60,000 randomly selected occupied
American households in 754 primary sampling units (out of the nation's roughly
3,000 counties, or groups of contiguous counties). Its main purpose is to deter-
mine changes in population, demographic characteristics, and economic status,
especially employment and unemployment. In keeping with standard practices of
the BLS, the reference week is the one that includes the 12th day of the month.
The BLS adopted the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
in 2002, bringing its industry and occupation categories into conformity with those
of all other federal agencies, including NIOSH (Bowler et al., 2003). One important
change resulted from adoption of the NAICS: forestry, fishing, and hunting had
been classified in the much broader “services” sector, separately from agriculture,
but are now included with agriculture to form the new AFF sector.

TABLE E-3 Census Special Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tabulations,
United States, 1990 and 2000
Occupation 1990 2000

Farmers and ranchers 829,919 587,015

Farm, ranch, and other agricultural managers 257,446 201,980

First-line supervisors of farm, fishing, and forestry workers 55,503 57,440

Hired farm workers 797,405 806,075

Fishing and hunting workers 58,493 51,100

Forestry and conservation workers 20,431 18,980

Logging workers 115,524 105,675

Total, all types of occupations (above) 2,134,721 1,828,265
NOTE: Redefinition of some occupational categories in 2000 required combining some 1990 figures
to correspond to the new definitions. Moreover, “Hired farm workers” were termed “Farm workers”
in 1990 and “Miscellaneous agricultural workers, including animal breeders” in 2000.
SOURCE: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/eeoindex/eeoindex.html .