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1982 – 2022, St. Joseph County
The frame first, dated, because every later article in this section hangs on it. St. Joseph County's farm census, as the published carriers print it: about 1,000 farms on 172,500 acres in 1982; about 900 farms on 174,226 acres in 1987; about 780 on 172,348 in 1992; about 680 on 154,142 in 1997 — the county's own comprehensive plan, which carries those four points, flags the counts as approximate and notes that land in farms "stayed relatively constant" through 1992 despite falling farm numbers, then lost over 18,000 acres by 1997; 712 farms on 178,674 acres in 2007 (a watershed report citing the 2007 census); 691 farms on 151,975 acres, average size 220 acres, in 2012; 629 farms on 149,981 acres, average 238, in 2017; and 547 farms on 153,034 acres, average 280, in 2022 — the last two read first-hand from the USDA's published county profiles and tables. The early points the leg wanted — 1850, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1959, 1978 — were not reached at first-hand strength and stand as a named gap; their settlers are the printed census volumes themselves, the 1880 volume's agriculture tables and the 1920 volume's county tables among them, whose publication pages were located and whose county tables remain to be read. One internal variance prints with the series: the state food-hubs study that carries the 2012 point in its main table prints 604 farms in a draft table inside the same study; the 691 figure stands on the study's USDA-cited table, and the 604 stands beside it, unresolved.
The county the series describes, at its two first-hand modern points: in 2017 the market value of products sold was $103,949,000, crops 80 percent and livestock 20 percent of sales; land in farms ran 89 percent cropland, 1 percent pastureland, 5 percent woodland; 28,116 acres — 19 percent of the land in farms — were irrigated; the top crops by acreage were corn for grain at 65,435 acres and soybeans at 53,398, with forage at 3,872 and wheat for grain at 1,505; livestock on 31 December 2017 stood at 4,873 cattle and calves, 28,308 hogs and pigs, 724 horses and ponies, 296 goats, and 362 sheep and lambs; milk from cows sold $4,818,000, hogs $12,350,000, and nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod $5,467,000. In 2022 the value of products sold rose to $162,244,000 ($130,136,000 crops, $32,108,000 livestock and poultry), the median farm was 137 acres, total cropland stood at 141,832 acres on 469 farms, irrigated land at 24,052 acres on 82 farms, and the harvested crops ran corn for grain 71,437 acres on 213 farms (12,273,499 bushels), soybeans 57,228 acres on 193 farms, wheat for grain 2,510 acres on 33 farms, and forage 4,699 acres on 176 farms; cattle and calves stood at 4,513 head on 120 farms and hogs and pigs at 34,974 on just 22 farms. Liberty Township's share of any of these figures is not broken out by any carrier reached, and none is estimated here.