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items 2 and 3 — the dated arc, with counts; the corn-and-livestock system
The prairie's first farming was wheat farming, and its peak is dated and priced:John S. Massey's fifteen acres yielding fifty bushels the acre, and George H. Service buying and shipping a million bushels of wheat in a single year through the town's elevators. Chapman's holders farmed the open prairie in hundreds of acres each — 700, 480, 370, 315 acres down the sketch roll — with Granville Woolman's sheep the livestock line's first form, clipping an average of 500 head a year. The passing is measured by the modern profile: the county's wheat in 2022 stood at 2,510 acres — a specialty remnant — while the order that replaced it fills the frame: corn at 71,437 acres and soybeans at 57,228, worked as a feed-and-stock system rather than a crop list, the grain feeding 34,974 hogs and 4,513 cattle in the county's 2022 count, with dairy drawing its inputs from the same acres (the dairy article below). Wheat rose on the prairie's first breaking, ruled the shipping era, and fell as corn, beans, and livestock took the system over — the arc printed at the counts the two ends of the record supply, the middle decades' county wheat series standing in the published census volumes as the arc's continuation.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township sketches (Massey's wheat; the prairie holders' acreages; Woolman's sheep), and this build's Businesses (Service's million bushels, 1879).
- USDA Census of Agriculture 2022, St. Joseph County profile (corn 71,437 acres; soybeans 57,228; wheat 2,510; hogs 34,974; cattle 4,513).