Forage, pasture, and the seed harvest

1856 — 2022

The quiet acres: The crops that fed the animals left fewer headlines than the crops that fed the market, but for a century they held much of the county's ground. Hay stood among the staples from the start — 11,055 tons in the Agricultural Society's account of 1856 — and the standard rotation kept every farm cycling through two or three years of grass, timothy and clover, before the plow came round again. The 1908 survey describes the system and its cost: the first clover crop was cut for hay "and the second generally harvested for the seed," a practice that returned little humus to the soil, so that "the grass lands of the county are generally deficient in organic matter"; the surveyors urged alfalfa, successfully grown on the uplands, as feed and soil renovator. That clover-seed harvest is the county's documented seed trade — a seed crop taken off Allen County fields as a matter of routine husbandry, recorded by the federal survey; no Allen County seed-corn house or seed firm of the kind that made other Indiana towns famous appears in the record this section rests on, and the absence is stated rather than filled. As livestock thinned and the two-crop system spread, the forage acres contracted to a rump: the 2022 census counts forage — hay and haylage of every kind — on 10,170 acres, and the survey-era mosaic of pasture, meadow, and woodlot survives in the modern census as the small remainder of the county's 329,722 farm acres that is not cropland. The county still makes hay; it no longer lives in a hay economy.

Sources:

1. History of Allen County, Indiana (Kingman Brothers, 1880) — hay among the 1856 staples at 11,055 tons.
2. U.S. Bureau of Soils, Soil Survey of Allen County, Indiana (1908; issued 1910) — the grass years in the rotation, clover's first crop for hay and second "generally harvested for the seed," the humus warning, and the case for alfalfa.
3. USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: Allen County, Indiana — forage (hay and haylage, all) on 10,170 acres; cropland as the great bulk of the county's 329,722 acres in farms.