As Mason County makes comprehensive plans for the future, we must consider data from the trends that brought us to this point. Mason County has an area of 157,683 acres. The USDA Ag Census showed 150,070 acres of farms in 1987 while the most recent USDA Soil Survey of Mason County (1986) showed around 34,000 Prime Farmland acres.
Mason County’s topography is dominantly undulating to very steep and is dissected by many small streams.. This topography does not support the large fields needed to compete economically with the corn belt’s large-scale machinery.