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1982 – 2022
The county's farm ground did not drain away in a straight line, and this section does not narrate it as one. The measured arc, from the series article above: land in farms ran about 172,500 acres in 1982, 174,226 in 1987, 172,348 in 1992, 154,142 in 1997, 151,975 in 2012, 149,981 in 2017 — and 153,034 in 2022, a slight rise against 2017. Across the whole span the farm count fell from about 1,000 to 547 while the average farm grew from 220 acres (2012) to 238 (2017) to 280 (2022): consolidation is the proven story; monotonic loss past 2017 is not, because the carrier does not show it. What remains, at county strength in 2022, is a corn-and-soybean county — corn for grain 71,437 acres, soybeans 57,228, wheat 2,510, forage 4,699 — with a hog-led livestock sector (34,974 hogs on 22 farms; 4,513 cattle on 120 farms), heavy irrigation at 24,052 acres, and a real nursery and greenhouse line ($5,467,000 of sales in 2017). At township strength the record holds one sentence, the town plan's: very little farmland inside the town, abundant farmland in Liberty Township under the county's zoning — and no township crop breakdown exists in any carrier reached. The plan's own land-use statistics table was located but not extracted and stands as a named gap on that settler. No nursery or greenhouse seated in Liberty Township is named in any carrier searched — a tested negative at search strength, printed to close this section's last open test.