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1907 — 2022
The same county, read in acres instead of people: The Population section of this history tells the county's twentieth century as a movement of people — the city's share of the county falling from two-thirds in 1920 to under 38 percent in 2020, the county outside the city passing the city in the 1970s. The farm censuses tell the same movement in acres, and the two records are one fact. Land in farms stood at 71.0 percent of the county in 1954; the county's comprehensive plan, reading the censuses, found it "relatively constant" through 1992 despite falling farm counts — 172,500 acres in 1982, 172,348 in 1992 — then recorded what it calls, without softening, "alarming changes in supply": a loss of over 18,000 acres in the five years to 1997, to 154,142.
The modern profiles put the farm share at about 52 percent of the county's land in 2022. The conversion's face is visible as early as Howard's 1907 biographies, where the Portage Township farmer Joseph Eckman platted the part of his farm that "formerly adjoined the city of South Bend on the south" into "desirable residence lots on the west side of Michigan street" — the standing pattern of the next hundred years, one farm's edge at a time. The price record measures the pressure: in 1954 the county's farmland and buildings averaged $233.92 an acre, against $98.66 in rural Ripley County in the same census table — city-priced land already; in 2017 the estimated market value of farm land and buildings stood at $8,087 an acre. What the conversion left behind is not a shrunken version of the old farm county but two farm counties sharing one boundary.
The 2017 census counts a median farm of 40 acres against an average of 238: 107 farms of one to nine acres and 245 of ten to forty-nine — the horse-keeping, part-time, and market-garden fringe of a metropolitan county — beside 36 farms of a thousand acres and more, working the great bulk of the 149,981 acres. Both counties are real; the censuses count them in one column, and this record prints them so.
Sources:
- U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 1 — 71.0 percent of the county's approximate land area in farms in 1954, and the average value of land and buildings at $233.92 per acre, read against the table's county group.
- St. Joseph County / City of South Bend Comprehensive Plan (2002), Appendix A, section 3.3 and Table 3-2 — land in farms 1982–1997, the constancy through 1992, and the loss of over 18,000 acres by 1997 in the plan's own words.
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Eckman sketch — the farm adjoining South Bend platted into residence lots on Michigan Street.
- USDA, NASS, 2017 Census of Agriculture, County Table 1 — median farm size 40 acres against the 238-acre average; farms by size (107 of 1–9 acres; 245 of 10–49; 36 of 1,000 and over); estimated market value of land and buildings at $8,087 per acre.
- USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: St. Joseph County, Indiana — 153,034 acres in farms, read against the county's land area as the frame entry states it.