The Rural Labor Indicators (RLI) from the Center for Agriculture and the Economy allow users to compare several dimensions of local labor market health across farming-concentrated counties, other non-metro counties, and metro counties. These measures highlight meaningful differences in labor market conditions across counties with different populations and farming concentrations and provide a consistent way to compare labor market conditions in these counties over time.
The Economic Bulletin article "New Rural Labor Indicators from the Kansas City Fed Highlight Key Differences in Farming-Concentrated Counties" provides further details on the indexes and their construction. Included below are a downloadable CSV and customizable plots of the entire history of the RLI. Data are updated on a quarterly basis.
Download a CSV file of the data
When using the data, please give attribution with the following reference:
Brown, Jason P., Nathan Kauffman, and Shu-Kuei Yang. 2026. “New Rural Labor Indicators from the Kansas City Fed Highlight Key Differences in Farming-Concentrated Counties.” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Economic Bulletin, November 4.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City or the Federal Reserve System.