Merrick County, NE has 2.1× more landscaping and lawn-care businesses per resident than the national average.
Merrick County, NE already has 8 with employees and 22 without — 30 landscaping and lawn-care services in total, 38.7 per 10,000 residents against 18.2 nationally. That's 2.1× more than average, so this category is well covered here (US Census, County Business Patterns + Nonemployer Statistics 2023).
- In Merrick County
- 8
- Per 10k residents
- 38.7
- National rate
- 18.2
- Ratio
- 2.1× more than average
Population 7,746. Ranked 40 of 42 Nebraska counties with enough landscaping & lawn care data to compare — 1 = fewest per resident.
Source: US Census County Business Patterns ↗Merrick County, NE has 2 more landscaping and lawn-care services with employees than in 2017 — 6 then, 8 now, up 33%. Nationally the count grew 16% over the same years.
What this doesn't tell you: Census counts how many exist each year, not how many opened or closed. A rise of 2 could be 2 new businesses — or 10 openings and 8 closures. It also can't see solo operators without employees, in any year.
Series runs 2017–2023. Earlier vintages exist but are not comparable: Census changed which small counties it publishes after 2016, so including them would show counties losing an industry that never left.
Census code 561730 covers landscaping services: lawn maintenance and mowing, planting, tree and shrub work, and landscape design and installation.
The blind spot: The code mixes large landscape-installation firms in with routine mowing. A county can have several big design-and-build landscapers and still be short of anyone who will simply cut a lawn every two weeks.
County Business Patterns counts establishments with paid employees. A solo operator with no payroll — the most likely competitor for most of these businesses — is invisible to it, in every county, including this one.
There are more of these per resident here than in the country at large. That is a genuine argument against starting one in Merrick County without something specific that the 8already operating do not have. It is not fatal — a crowded category can still have a bad-service niche — but “there is room” is not the argument available to you here, and any tool that tells you otherwise is guessing.
Census counts these as one industry, so the 8 above includes all of them together. It cannot tell you how many are any single one.
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