Miscellany June 2 2014

The movie in the park on Saturday evening had a good reception. The Little Cousin Jasper people said that the crowd was about 350.

 On Sunday I wanted to see what was happening at the new Dollar General Store. On the way I noticed that the building trades house on Vine Street still needs a bit of work.

 On the west end of Vine digging has started to put in drainage tile. The old detention pond that was put in when Kirby Risk was build has been smoothed over and is gone.

 The Dollar General Store has a sign that it is hiring. They may be done--a small sign on the door said that interviews were May 30 at the library. As you can see, the landscaping is in. I could not see inside to see if the store had been stocked yet.

While Dollar General is hiring, the quarry is not. The water is no longer being pumped out and apparently no more rock is being removed. Compare the picture below with one taken two weeks ago. I heard through the grapevine that stone is being sold from the piles north of the quarry, but that the quarry itself is closed. If anyone knows more, feel free to use the comments. (How long do you think it will take for the quarry to fill up if it is in fact closed?)

Another place not hiring is the obstetrics unit at Jasper County Hospital. The unit is closed and the existing staff have been let go.

I saw soybeans coming up in the fields around Rensselaer reminding me that Jasper County remains Indiana's largest agricultural producer. From the Jasper County Economic Development Organization's June Newsletter:

 Agriculture is big business and once again Jasper County is Indiana’s top producer of agricultural products as measured by market value sold with $357,402,000. Of this total, crops represented $208,497,000 and livestock, poultry and related products $148,905,000. The Census is taken once every five years and in 2007 Jasper County also was the top agricultural producing county in the state with $293,544,000. In the 2012 Census, there were 615 farms in the county encompassing 282,831 total acres for an average farm size of 460 acres and a per farm average sold of $581,141. The Census is the leading source of statistics about American agriculture and considers a farm as any place for which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold. The estimated market value of farmland and related buildings in Jasper County averaged $2,819,873 per farm and $6,132 per acre. In terms of market value for machinery and equipment, Jasper County farms averaged $250,876 per farm. As a state, Indiana had 58,695 farms with 14,720,396 acres and an average farm size of 251 acres. For more information visit: www.agcensus.usda.gov 

The last day of school will be June 6. School will start again later this summer (we cannot really say "this fall", can we?) on August 12. That means that summer vacation is only two months long this year.