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1982–2022 · USDA NASS county profiles, 2017 and 2022; St. Joseph County Comprehensive Plan (2002), Table 3-2
St. Joseph County, Census of Agriculture: 1982 — about 1,000 farms, 172,500 acres in farms (the county plan's Table 3-2, its farm count flagged approximate in the plan itself); 1987 — about 900 farms, 174,226 acres; 1992 — about 780 farms, 172,348 acres; 1997 — about 680 farms, 154,142 acres; 2017 — 629 farms, 149,981 acres, average 238 acres (USDA county profile, read first-hand); 2022 — 547 farms, 153,034 acres, average 280 acres (USDA 2022 demographic profile, total column, read first-hand — independently confirming the endpoint the North Liberty file carried). The long movement is fewer and larger farms; it is not monotonic at the end — between 2017 and 2022 land in farms rose by 3,053 acres while farm numbers fell by 82. (Two cautions travel with the table: the 2022 profile's extraction interleaves a female-producer subset column — 324 farms, 192 acres average — beside the county totals, and the subset is not the total; and a secondary aggregator repeating USDA's acreage prints "40 farms" for the county, rejected here. NL-4's 2012 and 2007 points stand as leads consistent with USDA's rounded comparisons, not independently extracted.)
A conflict inside the county-plan carrier, printed whole: Table 3-2 implies a fall from 172,348 acres in farms in 1992 to 154,142 in 1997 — a drop of 18,206 acres — while the same plan's text reports a County Area Plan Commission study putting the 1992–97 loss at only about 1,800 acres. Both figures stand; neither is repeated elsewhere in this build as settled. Settler: the underlying 1992 and 1997 census county tables and the Commission study itself. The plan's own interpretation is printed at its strength: it credits farmland preservation in part to the county's 20-acre minimum-lot agricultural zoning.
The modern county economy, county class only (USDA 2017 profile): market value of products sold $103,949,000 (2022: $162,244,000); crops 80% of sales, livestock 20%; land in farms 89% cropland; 28,116 acres irrigated; leading crop acreages — corn for grain 65,435, soybeans 53,398, forage 3,872, wheat for grain 1,505, mint for oil among the leaders with its acreage withheld as (D); livestock at 31 December 2017 — hogs and pigs 28,308, cattle and calves 4,873, horses and ponies 724. None of these is a Union Township figure, and none is printed as one anywhere in this build.