small and midsize businesses in the leatherworking industry set up shop in the Rodgau's communities. Its products – handbags, suitcases, belts, wallets and purses – were made mostly in private homes as a kind of cottage industry. By 1975, this had led to the almost complete disappearance of the farming sideline. In 2004, only eleven farms were still being worked as main income earners, mostly to grow asparagus, and four were still being worked as a sideline. Besides leatherworking, metalworking also locally became a field of endeavour at roughly the same time to supply belt buckles, suitcase handles and suchlike. Major works were located in Weiskirchen, Jügesheim and Nieder-Roden. Nowadays, though, leatherware manufacturing and metalworking play only a subordinate rôle. In 1954, a new field of industry for this region established itself on Dudenhofen's outskirts, the Dudenhofen Sand Lime Works (Kalksandsteinwerk Dudenhofen), which quarried the fine dune sand available there for making up to 73 million bricks in one year. In the 1990s the company shifted its production focus to manufacturing porous concrete precision blocks (Plansteine), today known under the name Porit. In the early 1960s, Adam Opel AG chose Dudenhofen as the location for their test centre, which came into service in 1966. In the middle of a 4.8 km-long high-speed loop track are found a crash-test facility and a 6.7 km-long test track with all conceivable road types for longterm tests. Beginning in the 1960s, Rodgau opened up six major industrial parks with a combined area of 219 ha in which settled mainly service businesses such as the IBM product distribution centre (until 2005, thereafter Mann-Mobilia logistics centre), the firm Atlas Rhein Main, the FEGRO wholesale market, MEWA Textilservice, GEODIS, Pepsi-Cola Deutschland, PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences and a DHL postal freight centre. All together, in mid-2005, there were reported to be 3,871 businesses in Rodgau, among them 23 supermarkets from the best known chains and 16 hotels with 795 beds. The trend of shifting from producing industries and crafts to service industries became clear when 2003 is compared to 1987: ten years after the greater community was founded, service industries comprised 52% of the economy, but this share rose over the next 15 years to 73%. In Rodgau, roughly 150 high technology companies are resident. Dominating the technological field is information and communications technology for aviation and space travel, followed by sensor, measuring, control and analytical technology.