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Home > Maryland
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Maryland
Maryland's economic action is strongly focused in the tertiary service region, and this sector, sequentially, is strongly affected by location. One major service activity is hauling, centered on the Port of Baltimore and its related trucking and rail access. The Baltimore docks ranked 10th in the U.S. by tonnage in 2002. Although the port takes a wide assortment of products, the most usual imports are bulk commodities and raw materials, such as sugar, petroleum, iron ore, and fertilizers, often distributed to the moderately close industrialized centers of the inland Midwest by means of good overland moving. The port also receives numerous diverse brands of imported automobiles and is rank two auto port in the U.S.
A second service activity takes the lead of the close position of the core of government in Washington, D.C. and emphasizes administrative and technical tasks for the defense or aerospace industry and bio-research laboratories, on top of staffing of satellite administration headquarters in the suburban or exurban Baltimore and Washington area. In addition, many medical research and educational institutions are situated in the state. In fact, the different workings of Johns Hopkins University and its medical research facilities are at the present the biggest single employer in the Baltimore area. Altogether, white collar administrative and technical workers cover 25% of Maryland's labor force, one of the premier state percentages in the nation.
Maryland has a huge food-production sector. A large constituent of this is commercial fishing, based in Chesapeake Bay, but moreover including activity off the short Atlantic coast. The biggest catches are the striped bass, blue crab, menhaden, and oysters. The Bay too has uncounted millions of overwintering waterfowl in its various wildlife refuges. While not, firmly speaking, a profitable food resource, the waterfowl carry a tourism segment of sportsmen.
Maryland has large regions of fertile undeveloped land in its Piedmont and coastal zones, even though this land use is being invaded upon by urbanization. Agriculture is directed to dairying, particularly in piedmont and foothill areas for close by large city milksheads plus specialty delicate horticulture crops, such as peas, watermelons, muskmelons, tomatoes, sweet corn, squash, and cucumbers. In addition, the southern counties in the western seashore of Chesapeake Bay are temperate enough to bear a tobacco cash crop sector, which has existed ever since early Colonial times but dropped greatly after a state government takeover in the 1990s. There is also a hefty automated chicken-farming division in the state's southeastern area; Salisbury is address to Perdue Farms. Maryland's food-processing plants are the most noteworthy type of manufacturing by worth in the state.
Manufacturing, while big in dollar value, is highly expanded with no sub-sector constituting over 20% of the total. Usual forms of manufacturing consist of electronics, chemicals, and computer equipment. The once grand principal metals sub-sector, which at one time incorporated what was then the largest steel plant in the planet at Sparrows Point, still exists, but is hard-pressed with foreign competition, company mergers, and bankruptcies. Throughout World War II the Glenn L. Martin Company airplane factory by Essex, MD employed about 40,000 people.
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