Independent economic studies for the governments, growers, and businesses of the Yakima Valley, built on Yakima County's own federal data and designed to hold up when a lender or a funder reviews them.
| Largest sectors by employment | Jobs | Concentration |
|---|---|---|
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 28,694 | 30.12x |
| Health care & social assistance | 18,529 | 1.05x |
| Retail trade | 11,513 | 0.97x |
| Manufacturing | 8,103 | 0.83x |
| Accommodation & food services | 7,012 | 0.66x |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2023 annual averages, Yakima County. Concentration is a location quotient (county sector share of employment divided by the national share), computed by Project Red Team. Covered jobs exclude the self-employed and some agricultural workers.
Yakima County runs on roughly 116,000 covered jobs across about 6,100 establishments, at an average annual wage near $49,800, and job counts edged up about 0.7 percent over the year. That wage sits below the national average and reflects how much of the work is seasonal and field-based. Health care, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality fill out the payrolls of Yakima, Sunnyside, and the valley towns, the ordinary spine of a large agricultural region. The real story is the concentration: agriculture, forestry, and fishing employ close to 28,700 people here, about 30 times the national share, one of the highest farm concentrations of any county in the country. That single number is why almost every project in the valley connects back to what is grown, picked, packed, or processed, and why water and labor availability sit underneath every honest projection.
Yakima County is the agricultural heart of Washington. The Yakima Valley leads the nation in hops and ranks at the top of the state in apples, and it carries cherries, pears, wine grapes, dairy, and row crops alongside them. Yakima anchors the county's health care, retail, and services economy, while Sunnyside, Grandview, and the lower valley hold much of the packing, processing, and dairy capacity that turns raw harvest into shipped product. The Yakama Nation, whose reservation covers much of the county's south and west, is a major landholder, employer, and force in water and agricultural policy.
A new food-processing line, a cold-storage or packing expansion, a winery or hop-handling facility, or a dairy build-out all turn on the same two questions: what the project genuinely adds to the valley economy, and whether it pencils under real conditions for water, labor, and the irrigation supply the whole region depends on.
The kind of question a study here handles most often is a food-processing or cold-storage expansion in the lower valley, where the harvest either gets value added close to the field or leaves the county as raw fruit. Manzana Products in Sunnyside, for example, followed a 60 million dollar investment in 2024 with added applesauce capacity, the sort of build-out that raises real questions about new jobs, water and energy load, and how much of the supply chain stays local. An honest study would separate the genuinely new activity from the harvest that would have been processed somewhere regardless, and test whether the added throughput holds up against the valley's labor supply and irrigation outlook.
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 orchard, hop, and dairy core, and the irrigation and water-supply record that any project in the valley has to be measured against.
We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Yakima 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.
National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Yakima 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.
Have a project in Yakima County? Tell us what you are weighing and where. We will lay out what it takes to answer it, and what it costs.
Commission a study