Illinois again #3 in business relocation ranking

Illinois remains among the best places for businesses looking to relocate, according to Site Selection Magazine.

Named third in the 2017 Governor’s Cup rankings, Illinois ranked behind only Texas and Ohio in new corporate facility projects, according to the magazine.

The Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro area remained the top metropolitan area with more than 1 million people, with 402 new and expanded facilities projects, according to the ranking.

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Buy Illinois Challenge: Supporting agribusinesses and Illinois products

Illinois agriculture extends beyond the fields of corn, beans and wheat you see while driving on the highway. Illinois is ranked first in the country for food processing sales and is home to 2,372 food processing companies, which support more than 71,000 jobs in our state. Every day we are impacted by the agriculture in our state.

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Celebrate National Pig Day

Today, March 1 is National Pig Day, which is cause to celebrate in Illinois because we are one of the nation’s top four pork producers. Pig Day is mostly celebrated in the Midwest since it is the home of the holiday. Pigs are an important part of diets and economies all over the world, our country and more specifically, our state.

Only North Carolina, Iowa and Minnesota outranked Illinois’ 1.9 billion pounds of pork production in 2011.

The pork industry contributes more than $1.8 billion to the state’s economy and generates more than $170 million in state taxes. On top of that, market hogs consume about 155 million bushels of corn each year, the equivalent of more than 911,000 acres. Market hogs also consume about 32 million bushels of soybeans.

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Did you know? The world’s only drive-through post office is located in downtown Chicago

The Old Chicago Main Post Office is a nine-story building designed in the Art-Deco architectural style. It was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White and built in 1921, but it was expanded greatly to its current size in 1932.

The expansion entailed adding a total of nine floors for more than 60 acres, or 2.5 million square feet, of floor space.

Its expansion and capacity were necessary to serve the city’s large volume of postal business, driven by the mail-order businesses of Chicago-based companies Montgomery Ward and Sears.

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