Poultry-industry purchases alone are the source of more than ten thousand jobs in Minnesota. Most of us think of corn and soybeans as the supplier industry that supplies feed for poultry. But while these are the largest direct inputs to poultry, they are not the largest suppliers when the entire chain of suppliers is considered. Consider for a minute the other industries and jobs involved in selling soybean meal to a turkey farm. The soybean farmer must purchase seed, fertilizer, equipment, land, and labor.
Trucking is needed.
The trucking company has to buy its equipment, maintain the trucks, gas them up, and pay the drivers. Over five thousand people work in industries such as food stores, eating establishments, recreation, health care, housing, and others where poultry industry employees spend their money. Actually, most industries are both supplier and employee consumer industries, selling some of their goods and services to the firms producing goods and services and some of them to employees for their personal consumption. Even though most do both, we are able to split out the amount spent by customers versus that spent by either the poultry industry or its suppliers. Estimating the number of employee consumer industry jobs that are dependent on the poultry industry is tricky because of the nature of the model used regional input-output analysis.