The specialty soils whole: the muck, the mint, and the truck crops named one by one

1914–1915 farm year and the county record · THE MUCK BELT AT BOUNDARY SIZE, PENN'S SHARE STATED

The banked fragment carries the muck specialty whole for one crop — peppermint, with Eller's claim and its LaGrange rival — and names no truck crop at all. This article supplies the missing row at its correct size. The governing open source is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's own muck-land survey: H. R. Smalley, Management of Muck-Land Farms in Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan, Farmers' Bulletin 761 (10 Oct. 1916), a field study of 140 muck farms (100 analysed for the farm year 1 Mar. 1914 – 1 Mar. 1915) in the northern-Indiana / southern-Michigan muck belt — the largest area of improved muck land in the North Central States, some 3,750,000 acres of swamp and muck across the two states, much of it by then producing “large quantities of grain, truck crops, and peppermint and spearmint oil.” Smalley's finding, quoted in substance: four distinct types of farming are practised on the muck — celery, onion, peppermint, and grain-and-stock farming — and the muck is “well suited to the growing of celery, onions, peppermint, cabbage, corn, and hay,” and fairly adapted, when fertilised, to oats, wheat and rye.

The truck crops named one by one, as the row requires: celery (28 farms analysed; average labour income $394 — the lowest, on the heaviest hand labour); onions (23 farms; $1,732 — the highest of the truck types); peppermint (10 farms; $1,519 — the mint of the banked fragment's Eller line, here counted as a muck type, not a lone claim); cabbage (named in the suitability list); and, completing Smalley's own list, corn and hay as the muck's grain side, with grain-and-stock farms (39 analysed; $1,056) the belt's fourth type. Cucumbers and potatoes — named in the audit row's parenthetical — do not appear in Smalley's muck crop lists as reached, and are not printed as muck crops on this record; if they grew as Penn truck crops, their settler is the Tribune farm pages and market records, named here. Penn's share, stated: Smalley's farm map places the studied muck farms across the northern-Indiana belt; the survey is a belt record, not a township roll, and no individual Penn Township muck farm is claimed from it. Penn's own muck ground and its peppermint are the banked fragment's; this article gives that mint its counted company — celery, onions, cabbage — at belt size, labelled as belt material.

Sources: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin 761 (1916), H. R. Smalley (140 farms studied; 100 analysed, farm year 1914–15; four muck types; labour incomes by type); banked Farms & Agriculture, peppermint article.