The county in numbers: the census frame

1879 — 2022

The benchmarks, as each count states them: The county history of 1880 opens its agriculture chapter with the threshed product of 1879 — 811,037 bushels of wheat, 829,554 bushels of corn, 143,791 bushels of oats — but prints no farm count, and no farm count for this county before 1950 was traced to its census table in the record reachable for this build; that gap is named here rather than bridged. The first full benchmark is the census of agriculture of 1950, reprinted with its successor in the 1954 volume: 2,408 farms, 221,456 acres in farms, an average of 92.0 acres. Four years later the 1954 census counted 1,938 farms on 212,109 acres, an average of 109.4 acres — 71.0 percent of the county's approximate land area of 298,880 acres stood in farms, and the average farm's land and buildings were valued at $22,682, or $233.92 an acre — against $98.66 an acre in rural Ripley County in the same printed table, the city's price already pressing on the county's soil.

The 1969 census counted 1,364 farms on 194,838 acres (average 143), and the 1974 census 1,112 farms on 181,138 acres (average 163). The county's own comprehensive plan, reading the censuses of 1982 through 1997, gives land in farms of 172,500 acres in 1982, 174,226 in 1987, 172,348 in 1992, and 154,142 in 1997, with farm counts it prints as approximations from Census Bureau charts — about 1,000, 900, 780, and 680. The modern profiles close the series: 691 farms on 151,975 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 acreage ticking up between the last two counts as each census states it, on a farm count still falling. Against the county's land area as the modern gazetteer states it, roughly 293,000 acres, the 2022 figure is about 52 percent of the county in farms, against 1954's 71 percent. One conflict rides on the frame itself: the state soil survey of 1916 gives the county an area of 560 square miles, which its pages never reconcile with the census's 298,880 acres — about 467 square miles — and the census figure is the one used here.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), chapter XIII, "Agriculture in St. Joseph County" — the 1879 threshed product (wheat 811,037 bushels; corn 829,554; oats 143,791).
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 1 — farms, land in farms, average size, land area, proportion in farms, and values for 1954 and 1950, read from the printed table.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1974 Census of Agriculture, County Data, St. Joseph County, Table 1 — all farms 1,364 (1969) and 1,112 (1974); land in farms 194,838 and 181,138 acres; average size 143 and 163 acres.
4. St. Joseph County / City of South Bend Comprehensive Plan (2002), Appendix A, Table 3-2, sourced to the Census of Agriculture — land in farms 1982–1997 and the approximate farm counts, with the plan's own note that the counts are approximate.
5. Indiana State Department of Agriculture, Food Hubs Feasibility Study (2015), citing the USDA Census of Agriculture — 691 farms and 151,975 acres for 2012.
6. USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2017 Census of Agriculture, Vol. 1, Chapter 2, Table 1, County Summary Highlights: Indiana — St. Joseph County: 629 farms, 149,981 acres, average 238 acres.
7. USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: St. Joseph County, Indiana (cp18141) — 547 farms, 153,034 acres, average 280 acres.
8. E. J. Quinn, "Soil Survey of LaPorte, St. Joseph, and Bartholomew Counties," 36th Annual Report of the Indiana Department of Geology and Natural Resources (1916), pp. 281–334 — the county's area stated as 560 square miles, carried here as the conflict.