Economic studies for Cassia County, built on the county's own numbers

What the numbers show

Cassia County runs on roughly 12,600 covered jobs across about 1,080 establishments, at an average annual wage near $47,600. Agriculture is both the largest employer and the defining specialization here, at close to 2,000 covered jobs and a location quotient of almost 19, meaning farm and ranch work is concentrated nearly nineteen times more heavily than the national average. Manufacturing follows at about 1,700 jobs, most of it food processing, running at about 1.6 times the national rate, and transportation and warehousing at about 1.65 times. This is one of the most agriculturally specialized economies in Idaho, and nearly everything else in the county sits downstream of what is grown, fed, and processed along the Snake River.

The Cassia County economy

Cassia County runs on irrigated agriculture and the plants that process it. Potatoes, sugar beets, grain, and a large dairy sector feed a food-processing base anchored at Burley, where the Snake River and the Minidoka irrigation project made high-value farming possible on the high desert. Manufacturing here is mostly food manufacturing, and transportation and warehousing exist to move crops and finished product to market. Health care, retail, and local government serve the Mini-Cassia population from Burley and neighboring Rupert.

A new processing line, a dairy or feedlot expansion, a cold-storage and distribution facility, or an irrigation-dependent farm venture all turn on the same two questions: what the project genuinely returns to the county, and whether it pencils under the region's real water, land, and commodity conditions.

A project we could put through the engine here

The live subject a study here almost has to reckon with is the expansion of food processing at Burley, led by McCain Foods' announced multimillion-dollar buildout of its french-fry plant, one of the largest of its kind, with new production capacity and additional jobs on the way. A project on that scale brings construction spending, direct hiring, and a large step-up in demand for locally grown potatoes and the acreage to supply them, and the county and its partners will want those effects measured honestly, separating durable operating activity from one-time construction and separating genuinely new production from output that would have been grown and shipped anyway. That is exactly the kind of question the engine is built to answer.

Public-data path: regional input-output multipliers, free-data regionalized or drawn from a purchased BEA RIMS II order where a project supplies one, BLS QCEW and Census LODES for the local labor base, USDA NASS for the county's potato, sugar-beet, and dairy economy, and company and state incentive filings where a processing project puts real capital, payroll, and sourcing numbers on the record.

What we do for Cassia County

We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Cassia County, in jobs, output, and tax revenue, with local leakage handled honestly), feasibility and viability (whether it should move forward, measured with the finance a lender runs), and fiscal impact for public budgets and grant applications. Every engagement returns a full report, a one-page brief, a reviewer pack, and a decision package.

And if a study is already in hand, we review it: we inventory its quotable claims, attach the evidence, and tell you plainly what survives review before you quote it or fund against it. More on reading a study before you rely on it.

Local, and grounded in the record

National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Cassia out of the analysis it needs. We work across the interior West, we can be on-site, and we build every study on the county's measured federal record, the same BLS and Census data behind the numbers above, so the result traces to a public source and survives scrutiny.

← All locations