Collin County Junior Livestock Show: Crop Report Rates Rooftops Good to Excellent
McKinney Crop Reporter Finds the Show Barn Is the Highest-Yielding Field Left in the County
MCKINNEY, Texas — The weekly crop progress and condition report for Collin County, compiled every Monday for thirty years by a retired volunteer crop reporter with a clipboard and a pickup that has never been washed on purpose, was released two days early this week to coincide with the Collin County Junior Livestock Show and Sale at Myers Park & Event Center.
It is the first edition in the report’s history to list rooftops as a crop.
“I report what is coming up out of the ground,” the reporter told Farm.FM from the cab of his pickup, parked beside the windmill at the Myers Park gate. “Thirty years ago that was wheat, corn and Johnson grass. I have not changed my method. The ground has changed its mind.”
Collin County Winter Wheat: Fair, With Scattered Model Homes
Collin County still grows real grain. The most recent Census of Agriculture counted 16,535 acres of wheat for grain and 13,149 acres of corn, which the reporter calls “respectable for a county where the combine yields to a school bus.”
This week’s winter wheat condition was rated 9 percent excellent, 48 percent good, 31 percent fair, 5 percent poor and 7 percent “now a Montessori.”
Corn was listed as 0 percent planted, which is normal for January. The reporter added a footnote explaining that one field east of McKinney appears 100 percent planted, but on closer inspection the crop is orange survey flags. “Survey flags: emerged,” the report reads. “Stand is uniform. Spacing is excellent. Yield potential, per the sign out front, is 214 homes from the low $600s.”
The 2022 Census of Agriculture county profile shows land in farms in Collin County fell 30 percent in five years, to 197,374 acres. The reporter’s summary of that statistic, which appears on page two in bold, reads in full: “Harvested. Not by us.”
Hay Adequate, Horses Concerned, Farms Small
Hay remains the county’s largest crop by acreage, at 29,908 acres, and the reporter rated supplies “adequate, with a strong odor of polo.” Collin County ranks 13th in Texas in horse sales, a fact he attributes to the number of horses in the county who have been described by their owners as “a lifestyle.”
Horse condition was rated good to excellent. Horse attitude was rated “aware of the zip code.”
The average Collin County farm is 85 acres, and 60 percent of the county’s 2,330 farms sold less than $2,500 of agricultural products in the census year. The reporter has added a livestock line titled “Operations Consisting of One Donkey and a Gate.”
Page Four: Livestock Condition at the Collin County Junior Livestock Show
The reporter arrived at Myers Park at 7 a.m. on opening day and began, as he begins every Monday, by kneeling down and putting his hand on the ground. He then looked up and realized he was in the broiler barn.
The park itself covers more than 158 acres and began in 1969 as the Collin County Youth Park, on land donated by a local family, according to the county’s Myers Park & Event Center page. He noted that its show barn, stall barn and pole barn held “the densest concentration of agriculture I have seen since the wheat was taller than the houses.”
He rated the show barn as follows:
- Broilers: Uniform. Excellent. Louder per square foot than any field in Texas.
- Market rabbits: Good to excellent. Two escaped briefly and were found under the bleachers, which the report lists as “volunteer growth.”
- Breeding rabbits: The reporter graded the breeds the only way he knows how. Silver Fox: heading. Mini Lop: tillering. Dwarf Papillon: “variety not recognized by this office, but thriving.”
- Market goats: Excellent. One goat attempted to eat page three of the report and was rated “aggressive early vigor.”
- Market swine: The reporter is aware that the census counted 654 hogs in the entire county. He stood in the swine barn for an hour with a pencil and declined to finish the arithmetic.
- Steers: Good to excellent. The reporter noted that the steers were the only cattle he saw all week that were not standing in the corner of a pasture with a FOR SALE sign behind them.
The Horticulture Table Outperforms the County
The most significant finding of the week came in the horticulture division, where 4-H and FFA exhibitors entered potted plants.
Nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod sales in Collin County came to $27.7 million in the census year, ranking 13th in Texas and roughly double the county’s sales of grains, oilseeds, dry beans and peas combined. He had never seen it on a folding table.
“By value of production,” he wrote on page four, “the leading crop in Collin County is something in a pot. The highest-yielding acre in the county this week was eight feet long and had a skirt on it.” He has since asked that the horticulture display be added to the county’s list of growing regions, alongside the Blackland Prairie.
Corrections and Methodology, Courtesy of FFA
The report was reviewed before release by a Farmersville FFA member showing a market lamb, who was asked to “check the spelling” and checked everything.
She returned it with four corrections in green ink. Rooftops are not a crop, she wrote, because nothing is harvested from them except leaves out of gutters. Survey flags should be moved to a section titled “Weeds, Commercial.” The horse attitude rating had no defined scale. And the fourth page, she noted, was the only page in the report that was not describing something getting smaller.
“Your report is fine,” she told him. “Your categories are from 1994. The county is still farming. It’s just doing a lot of it in one week, in one park, with a show stick.”
The reporter read her notes twice in the pickup. Then he accepted all four, added her name to the masthead as “Methodology,” and rewrote the summary line at the top of page one. It now reads: “Collin County agriculture: concentrated, not disappearing. Leading growing region this week: 7117 County Road 166. Condition: excellent. Hours: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.”
Results from the most recent show, including a Wylie East exhibitor who took the market goat class, Grand Champion Medium Wool and Grand Champion Market Lamb in a single week, are posted in the Murphy Monitor’s show coverage. The reporter filed those under “Yield, Exceptional.”
Next Monday’s report will return to its normal route. The reporter told Farm.FM it will contain one new line, which he has already typed: “Rooftops: removed from survey on advice of Methodology. Still emerging.”
Five Humorous Observations About Texas 4-H Livestock Shows
- The man rated winter wheat 7 percent “now a Montessori.” That’s the only crop condition in Texas where the yield goes up and the farmer still loses.
- Sixty percent of Collin County farms sell under $2,500 a year. The champion broiler pen made more noise than all of them combined, and it only needed a week.
- Collin County ranks 13th in the state in horses and 13th in the state in plants in pots. Somewhere a horse is standing next to a fern, and both of them are making more money than the corn.
- He knelt down to feel the soil and found out he was in the broiler barn. Every farmer has done that. Most of us just don’t write it up in a report.
- A teenager fixed thirty years of crop reporting in green ink and got listed on the masthead as “Methodology.” That’s the most accurate job title ever handed out at a Texas livestock show.