PuroChile › Sectors

Farming, forestry and fishing

Agriculture, livestock, forestry and fishing: section A of the tax register. It is the most evenly spread branch in the country — it takes 23 communes to reach half of its employment, more than any other — and one of the three that employ fewer people today than in 2005.

Maps exactly onto CIIU Rev. 4 section A.

Dependent workers

797,967

2024

Share of all formal work

8.2%

Chile

Annual sales

1,518 M

UF · 2024 · 15 communes withheld

Since 2005

−5%

workers

Territorial distribution

343/346 communes

Shaded by how much of each commune's own formal payroll this sector is — not by headcount, which would draw the same map of where people live for every sector.

Most workers

Counted at the firm's registered address, not the workplace. SII assigns a company's whole payroll to the commune of its tax domicile, so a head office in Santiago carries the shifts worked everywhere else. Read this as where the sector files, and the count below as where its workers live.

Most concentrated

Communes with at least 200 workers in the sector, so a village with one firm does not top the list.

What the branch is made of

13 divisions · 73 activities

A section of twenty-one parts says what this page is called. The register files firms two levels below it, and those parts are not one economy: actividades de apoyo a la agricultura y la ganadería y actividades poscosecha and caza ordinaria y mediante trampas y actividades de servicios conexas share a letter and little else. Each division has a page of its own.

The list stops where 4 divisions have accounted for 84% of the branch's employment. The other 9 are together 16.3% of it and are drawn above, each as its own tile: every division of the register.

Two ways to count the jobs

SII 2024 · Casen 2024

Where the firm files

797,967

employees · SII register

Where the worker lives

493,837

employees · Casen

Everyone working in it

635,004

employed · Casen

Distance between them

−38%

Casen vs SII

Region by region

Firm's address (SII)Worker's home (Casen)

Neither figure is where the work happens. The register counts a job at the address the company pays its taxes from; the survey counts it at the address the worker sleeps at. A mine is at neither.

What they do is bracket it, and the gap between them is itself the reading. It is widest exactly where work is subcontracted or run from a head office, and narrowest where the firm and the job are in the same place.

They are also not the same quantity: SII counts every employment relationship reported during the year, so a person with two jobs counts twice, while Casen counts people at one moment. The two columns are read against each other, never subtracted.

Casen is a survey and is read at region and country level only: split by branch, the median commune cell holds six sampled workers. Cells under 30 are withheld.

Series 2005–2024

2005–2024

observed 2005–2024

Who the sector runs on

SII 2024

No salesMicro 0.0–2 mil UFSmall 2–25 mil UFMedium 25–100 mil UFLarge > 100 mil UF

The top bracket — firms selling over a million UF a year

Firms in it101

Of all firms in the sector0.10%

Of its sales64.2%

Of its payroll10.5%

The land and who works it

Agricultural census · INE · 2020/2021

45,742,565

hectares in holdings

48.7%

of them under a named use

48.9%

of the crop land is irrigated

Pasturehover a tile for its count; click a group to open itFive families of land use, grouped by PuroChile from the fourteen categories the census publishes. The fifteenth tile is not a category: it is the censused surface less the fourteen.

The agricultural census measured 45,742,565 hectares of holdings in Chile in the 2020/2021 agricultural year, and this is how it divided them.

Fourteen of the fifteen tiles are categories the census publishes. The fifteenth is not: it is the censused surface less the other fourteen, and what it holds is scrub, barren ground, roads and buildings. Across Chile it is half of everything, because most of the censused surface is Patagonian scrub and northern desert inside very large holdings.

Irrigation is asked of eleven of the uses and not of forest, native woodland, natural pasture or untilled ground — so the 48.9% above is a share of the 1,840,109 hectares the question applies to, not of the whole.

The census counts holdings by comuna and by region only, and one holding can have land in several comunas — so there is no count for this level and PuroChile does not make one by adding.

VIII Censo Nacional Agropecuario y Forestal 2021, INE

Artificial intelligence

estimate · 2026-05

Exposure of the work

2.6%

of its tasks, worldwide

Use in Chile

0.43×

of its share of employment

Chile against the world

1.84×

all sectors, per capita

Covered by the estimate

71%

of the sector's workers

What this sector employs, by occupation

ManagementProfessionals and techniciansAdministrative supportServices and salesSkilled farming and fishingTrades, operators and elementary occupationsCasen 2024 · employed people in the sector

Less AI use than this sector's weight in employment would give it: 0.43 times its share, estimated from the occupations it actually employs in Chile.

The two figures answer different questions. Exposure is a property of the work — how much of what these occupations do is work AI is used for anywhere. Use is a property of the country — how much of that is actually happening here.

Nationally, 48% of Chilean conversations are work, and they split 51% augmentation to 49% automation — AI alongside the person more often than instead of them.

An estimate, not a measurement, and the only one on this site. The index publishes by US occupation, not by sector: these figures weight it by the occupational mix Casen finds in this sector in Chile, across six groups coarse enough for the two classifications to agree. Withheld cells put a floor of 1.1 points of national use under any group. Source: Anthropic Economic Index, junio 2026 (CC BY), cruzado con la Encuesta Casen 2024.

By region

Region	Workers	Of the sector	Of its own payroll	Living here	Firms	Since 2005
Metropolitana	206,567	25.9%	3.6%	60,075	13,050	−15%
Maule	161,611	20.3%	33.7%	102,414	19,238	+77%
O'Higgins	146,066	18.3%	33.6%	89,740	13,983	+7%
Los Lagos	70,149	8.8%	19.0%	45,931	9,233	+27%
Valparaíso	48,487	6.1%	7.2%	44,046	7,930	−41%
Biobío	41,967	5.3%	7.5%	41,015	6,369	−35%
Ñuble	38,425	4.8%	24.8%	27,173	7,093	+78%
Araucanía	27,460	3.4%	9.0%	26,343	8,068	−25%
Coquimbo	27,240	3.4%	12.1%	20,888	4,646	−51%
Los Ríos	13,241	1.7%	12.3%	15,549	3,914	−19%
Magallanes	5,353	0.7%	6.8%	5,853	1,442	−26%
Atacama	4,998	0.6%	5.4%	4,412	845	−77%
Aysén	3,268	0.4%	9.2%	3,271	1,293	+1%
Arica y Parinacota	2,199	0.3%	4.0%	5,080	1,886	−22%
Tarapacá	664	0.1%	0.6%	1,234	330	−15%
Antofagasta	272	0.0%	0.1%	—	223	−61%

"Workers" is SII's count at the firm's registered address; "living here" is Casen's count of employees of this branch who live in the region. They are different measurements of different things and the columns are read side by side, not subtracted. A dash is a cell with fewer than 30 sampled workers.