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1858–2022 · USDA Census of Agriculture county tables 2017/2022; Howard (1907), agriculture chapter §5; The Farm News of St. Joseph County, June 1953, via Michiana Memory
Orchards and small fruit are a small, stable county sideline in the modern census: 13 farms with orchard land in both 2017 and 2022, on 21 acres rising to 27; berries on 9 farms, acreage withheld — the table corrects a tentative earlier reading of "about 34 acres, single-digit farm count" carried in this build's working papers. No orchard or small-fruit operation is named for Union Township in any carrier searched; the 1875 atlas's "fruit easily raised" is a county boast, not a township orchard. Mechanisation prints at its verified endpoints only, county class: horses and ponies stood at 724 head on the county's farms in 2017 and 944 head on 84 farms in 2022 — rising while farm numbers fell, by which years the county horse count is no longer a draught-power measure and must not be read as one. Tractor counts at dated points (1920, 1940, 1959) were not reached; the succession stands as a named gap (settler: the printed census agriculture volumes).
The institutions, in a row, each dated, none merged — all county class except where a township result is expressly stated. The St. Joseph County Agricultural Society was reorganised on 15 March 1858 under the act of 17 February 1852; its first fair on the new grounds ran 28–30 September 1858 (the fair article below carries the grounds). The Farmers' Mutual Fire Insurance Company of St. Joseph County organised 25 August 1877, losses paid by pro-rata assessment; Howard names its incorporators — no separate Union Township mutual is named. The St. Joseph County Horticultural Society formed 9 November 1892. The Grange: Howard's §5 names St. Joseph Valley Grange, No. 584 — "most successful," its Aaron Jones repeatedly Master of the Indiana State Grange and for several years of the National Grange — and Pomona Grange, No. 31; Congressional Record petitions of 1902 and 1904 locate No. 584 "of South Bend." No Union Township grange — name, number, hall, or charter — was found in any carrier searched, Howard §5 read whole included (settler: Indiana State Grange charter records). Farmers' Institutes ran yearly by 1907, a full week in fall or winter with Purdue lecturers; no founding date is printed because none was carried. The county agent / Farm Bureau arrival prints as an unresolved pair: the June 1953 Farm News retrospective (its digitised text two-column-interleaved, cited with that caveat) gives a first county agent, John S. Bordner, serving 1911–1918, and "on Oct. 14, 1911, 22 farmers of St. Joseph County met" — while a March 1913 date appears in the same interleaved text in connection with the county Farm Bureau's organisation. A 1911 county-agent date predates the Smith-Lever Act (1914) and rests on the 1953 retrospective alone; the interleaving does not let this section state cleanly which event the March 1913 date attaches to. Both dates stand; settlers: the issue's page image at Michiana Memory, and Purdue Extension's appointment record. No Union Township Farm Bureau local is named in any carrier searched.