The wheat era and its passing

1879 — 2022

The first cash crop, outlasted by everything it paid for: In 1879 wheat stood where it had stood since the prairies were broken — level with corn at the head of the county's product, 811,037 bushels threshed against corn's 829,554, from a county whose mills, elevators, and river-and-rail shipments were built to move it. The state survey of 1916 still names "corn and wheat" as "the principal crops of the county," but it prints wheat's troubles in the same breath: an average yield of about 18 bushels to the acre, "considerable damage... done of late years by the Hessian fly," and a crop that "does not do well on the low-lying lands, as it is usually affected by the late frosts in the spring" — the same frost that had taken the whole crop in June 1835. The censuses then measure the fade in acres. In 1949 the county harvested wheat from 26,732 acres on 1,171 farms, 695,321 bushels; in 1954, from 23,121 acres, 665,671 bushels, of which 604,481 bushels were sold. By 2017 wheat for grain occupied 1,505 acres on 23 farms, and in 2022, 2,510 acres — a rotation crop and a cover in a corn-and-soybean system, at something under a tenth of its mid-century acreage. Wheat did not fail in St. Joseph County; it was succeeded — first by the corn-and-livestock order and the dairy and truck lines the next entries take up, then by the soybean. The bushel the county once sold to the world it now grows chiefly to rest the ground between the two crops that pay.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), chapter XIII — 811,037 bushels of wheat threshed in 1879.
2. E. J. Quinn, "Soil Survey of LaPorte, St. Joseph, and Bartholomew Counties" (1916) — corn and wheat as the county's principal crops; wheat at about 18 bushels to the acre; Hessian fly damage; frost on the low lands.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 9, Part 1 — wheat threshed or combined: 1,171 farms and 26,732 acres in 1949; 1,103 farms and 23,121 acres in 1954; 695,321 and 665,671 bushels; 604,481 bushels sold in 1954.
4. USDA, NASS, 2017 Census of Agriculture, County Table 1 — wheat for grain on 1,505 acres, 23 farms, 104,681 bushels.
5. USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: St. Joseph County, Indiana — wheat for grain on 2,510 acres.