ISSUE 011
Where Missouri Actually Makes Things
I went looking for Missouri manufacturing expecting to find it in St. Louis and Kansas City, because that is where the famous plants are. The concentration is not there. It is in Ralls County and Barry County and Laclede County, and in places where a single plant is a third of the payroll. That turned out to be the whole story, so this entry is about where the factories are rather than how many there are.
An idea worth thinking about
Six of Missouri's ten most concentrated industries are factories
MERIC publishes a short brief ranking Missouri industries by location quotient — the share of state employment an industry holds, divided by the share it holds nationally. Above 1.0 means more concentrated here than in the country at large. The October 2026 edition puts the manufacturing sector overall at 1.2, and six of the ten most concentrated three-digit industries in the state are manufacturing: electrical equipment at 1.43, transportation equipment at 1.42, printing at 1.4, machinery at 1.4, chemicals at 1.38, food at 1.37.
Read the worked examples underneath each one and the geography gives itself away. Regal Rexnord in Cassville. George's in Cassville. Conagra in Marshall. Triumph Foods in St. Joseph. Mountain View Fabricating in Mountain View. Mississippi Lime in Ste. Genevieve. These are not suburbs of anywhere. One four-digit line is worth pausing on if you are in the trades: ventilation, heating, air conditioning and commercial refrigeration equipment manufacturing sits at an LQ of 3.02, three times the national concentration, 100 establishments, 8,409 jobs.
What a concentration number is actually telling you is that the industry sells outside the region. You cannot employ three times the national share of people making HVAC equipment by selling to your neighbours. So a high LQ is a rough proxy for export income arriving in a county — which is the thing that pays for everything else in a small town.
The brief is built on BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for 2025, accessed August 2026, and MERIC says plainly that the data carries a release lag. It is a state-level document; it does not break any of this down by county, which is the gap the next slot fills.
A tool I disappeared into
Your own county's manufacturing numbers, from the payroll records
The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages is not a survey. It is a count, assembled from what employers file for unemployment insurance, which means it covers roughly every job with a payroll rather than a sample of them. The public data viewer lets you pick a county, pick an industry, and get establishments, average employment, average annual pay, the year-over-year change, and the location quotient against the national figure. It is free and it needs no account.
I pulled the 2024 annual file for all 115 Missouri jurisdictions and sorted private manufacturing by location quotient. Ralls County came out at 6.24. Osage 4.75, Barry 4.34, Laclede 4.31, McDonald 3.63, Perry 3.55, Buchanan 3.15, Pettis 3.04, Ste. Genevieve 2.91. Sixty of the 115 sit at or above the statewide 1.20. Twenty-eight are at or above 2.00. Cape Girardeau County, for the record, is 1.11 — above the national rate, well below the state's.
Three honest limits. The 2024 annual data is the most recent complete vintage, so it is roughly two years behind you. Small counties get figures suppressed when one employer would be identifiable, so some cells are blank. And QCEW misses the self-employed and most farm work, because neither files unemployment insurance — which matters more in rural counties than anywhere else.
The use for it is narrow and real. Look up your county, then look up the two counties you compete with for labour. If one of them has three times your concentration in the thing you make, that is where your next hire is already working, and that is who you are bidding against.
Learn something
The automation guide whose first instruction is not to automate yet
NIST's Manufacturing Extension Partnership publishes a 21-page paper called Automation 101, free, no form to fill in. It is written for small shops, and the thing I liked about it is how much of it is about restraint. One line in the checklist: do not automate anything that is not a lean process. Automate a mess and you get a faster mess with a maintenance contract attached.
Its framing of a first project is the useful part. Either solve a specific problem — a bottleneck, a quality defect, a job nobody wants to do — or build toward a defined future state. What it warns against is the middle, where you buy technology because the technology exists and then work out afterwards what it was for. It also names the barriers honestly: capital risk, staff who remember the last system that did not deliver, and the sheer fact that you are already busy.
One disclosure the paper does not make loudly enough. Its opening statistic, that manufacturing technology investment in 2024 ran 30 percent above 2023, is attributed to Rockwell Automation — a company that sells automation equipment. Treat that number as marketing rather than measurement. The rest of the document is MEP's own field experience and reads like it.
MEP centres do sell services, and the last chapter is a pitch for them. That does not make the first four chapters less useful, and you can read the checklist, apply it, and never call anyone.
What we’re seeing
279,300 manufacturing jobs, and 400 of them were added in the last year
University of Missouri Extension publishes a monthly Missouri Manufacturing Indicators brief. The September 2026 edition reports 279,300 people employed by Missouri manufacturers, up 500 from the prior month and up 400 over the year — a 0.1 percent increase, against 1.0 percent growth in total state employment and 0.3 percent in national manufacturing. The sector is not shrinking. It is standing still while everything around it moves.
Pay is moving, though. Average hourly earnings in Missouri manufacturing were $39.50 over the three months ending in September, up 6.5 percent on the year, against 3.7 percent for US manufacturing and 5.9 percent for Missouri's private sector as a whole. Consumer inflation over the same window was 3.5 percent. So real manufacturing wages here rose while headcount did not, which is what a sector buying fewer and more expensive people looks like.
The employment figure depends on which programme you ask. 279,300 is the BLS Current Employment Statistics estimate for September 2026 — a monthly survey of employers. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages puts private manufacturing at 284,855 for the 2024 annual average, from administrative payroll records rather than a sample. MERIC's manufacturing industry page carries 282,255 across 7,636 establishments with a 2022 payroll of $19.1 billion and an average annual wage of $67,573. None of these is wrong. They are different instruments, different months, and different definitions of who counts. The honest statement is that Missouri manufacturing employs somewhere just under 285,000 people and has not grown much lately.
The geography is the part I did not expect. Working from the published QCEW county file, 60 of Missouri's 115 county-level jurisdictions have a manufacturing location quotient at or above the statewide 1.20. Not one of the four largest urban counties does: St. Louis County 1.00, Greene 0.99, Jackson 0.92, St. Louis City 0.89. Every one of them is at or below the national rate. Missouri's manufacturing concentration is real and it is almost entirely rural and small-city. That arithmetic is mine, from published figures, not a finding anyone else has written up.
On automation, the evidence is thinner than the conversation. MU Extension's January 2026 brief on AI use reports that 18.5 percent of Missouri businesses said they used AI in the two weeks before the December 2025 Census survey, slightly ahead of the US at 17.8 percent. The industry breakdown in that brief is national rather than Missouri-specific, and in it manufacturing sits at 13.7 percent current use with 19.0 percent planning to within six months — below the all-industry rate, well below information services at 36.5 percent. I have not found a Missouri-specific manufacturing AI figure. Anyone quoting one to you is probably quoting the national number.
So the inconvenient half, since Codefi sells training. Nothing above shows that Missouri manufacturers who adopt AI do better than those who do not. What it shows is a sector with flat headcount, wages climbing faster than inflation, and adoption rates in the bottom third of all industries. Whether that is an opportunity or just a description depends entirely on your shop, and no dashboard is going to settle it for you.
One question
What is the job in your shop that nobody wants to do?
One line. Automation 101 says that is usually the right first project, and I would like to know whether the answers cluster the way I suspect they do.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.