What farms remain, and what they grow

2022 — 2026

The count as it stands: The 2022 Census of Agriculture, the latest completed count, gives the county 547 farms on 153,034 acres, an average of 280 acres, with 141,832 acres of cropland, 1,262 of pastureland, 4,290 of woodland, and 24,052 irrigated acres — the last figure a quiet revolution against the 1954 count's 442 irrigated acres on nine farms: the county that spent a century getting water off its land now puts it back on, by center pivot on the sands. The farms sold $162,244,000 of product, up 56 percent from 2017 in the census's own comparison: corn for grain from 71,437 acres and soybeans from 57,228 stand first and second of the crops; hogs and pigs, 34,974 head, lead the livestock; milk from cows sold $8,490,000; cattle and calves numbered 4,513.

The people on the farms numbered 970 producers, 95 percent of the farms family farms, 242 of the producers new or beginning farmers — the census's profile of a farm sector that is at once consolidated in its production and continually re-entered at its edges. The mint still grows on the western muck in a fourth-generation family's nearly thousand acres. And inside the city the farm has taken its newest form: Unity Gardens, begun in 2008 by the public-health nurse Sara Stewart and Mitch Yaciw on a vacant lot at Broadway and Franklin bought at a tax sale, grown within a year into a nonprofit and by 2009 onto a seven-acre flagship garden on Prast Boulevard — a network of some forty to sixty free-pick gardens across the county in a given year, on a model its founders call dignified free food: anyone may pick.

The organization's own accounting to September 2025 counts more than 22,000 people engaged and over 400,000 pounds of food shared; the Tribune's 2026 profile of Stewart puts the gardens' own giveaway at 150,000 pounds in the year before. The fair still runs each summer on Ironwood Road; the market still opens on Northside Boulevard; the extension office still answers on Lafayette Boulevard. What remains of St. Joseph County farming, two centuries after the first furrow on Terre Coupee, is smaller in acres, larger in yield, stranger in its mixture — a thousand-acre corn operation and a seven-acre free garden in the same county column — and, by every count the record offers, still working.

Sources:

1. USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: St. Joseph County, Indiana — farms, acreage and its uses, irrigated land, crop acreages, sales and their composition, livestock inventories, producers, family farms, and beginning farmers; and 1954 Census of Agriculture, County Table 1, for the 442 irrigated acres of 1954.
2. Farm World (farmworldonline.com) — the Matthys family's mint operation in western St. Joseph County, as carried in the mint entry.
3. City of South Bend, Common Council resolution of November 24, 2014 (Bill No. 14-108) — Unity Gardens founded in 2008 by Sara L. Stewart and Mitchel Yaciw, begun on vacant city land, and grown to nearly fifty public gardens by 2014.
4. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Indiana, "Unity Gardens Support Indiana Community by Growing, Providing Free Healthy Food" — Stewart's public-health background, the first garden, the flagship garden in place since 2009, and the EQIP high tunnels of 2017.
5. Unity Gardens (organization's own profile, Benevity Causes) — the seven-acre LaSalle Square garden at 3701 Prast Boulevard, over forty neighborhood gardens, and the organization's figures to September 2025: over 22,000 people engaged and over 400,000 pounds of food shared.
6. South Bend Tribune, June 30, 2026 — the profile of Sara Stewart: the vacant lot at Broadway and Franklin, the gardens' growth, and 150,000 pounds of food given away from the gardens and greenhouses in the preceding year.