A value-added food chain

Table of Contents

Dan Perkins, shown here with his family, sells his organic produce grown in DeMotte to restaurants. He learned about the opportunity from Region Roots, a nonprofit food hub, run by the NWI Food Council.

Region farmers cultivate crops, business partners to stay on top of market

Anyone doubting the power of northern Indiana agriculture needs only to try buying some of its cropland.

Halderman Real Estate & Farm Management auctioned a 37-acre Newton County farm in December for a hammer price of $18,024 an acre.

“The average is $5,500 to $5,800 for cropland across the whole United States,” said F. Howard Halderman, the Wabash-based farm brokerage firm’s president. “We live in a premium area, and it’s priced as such.”

It’s no surprise to Rick Risley of Kentland.

“My family has been blessed to purchase acreage over the years,” he said. “Land is a great investment. Farming is a lucrative business.”

It’s an observation he makes as an agribusinessman. He serves on the board of directors of Keystone Cooperative, which supplies essentials for farm production across Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

When he isn’t doing that, he’s working on his own corn and soybean fields. For 47 years he has been working the land like his family has been for generations past and hopefully to come with his son and partner, Matt.

His is one of more than 3,400 northern Indiana operations across Lake, Porter, La Porte, St. Joseph, Newton, Jasper, Pulaski and Starke counties. Combined, they produce more than $2 billion in farm products on more than 1 million acres each season.

That represents 160 million bushels of corn and soybean; tons of crop residue to feed cattle, pigs and poultry along with eggs, watermelons, pumpkins, tomatoes, blueberries, table greens and root vegetables, according to Indiana and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture.

Generational farming

It’s a value chain forged by farmers, machinery dealers, input and infrastructure suppliers, food processors and export trade associations, putting Indiana in the top 10 of agricultural producing states and keeping it a major player in the world trade market.

Denise Scarborough also works on both sides of the northern Indiana agribusiness street.

She’s an ag lender for First National Bank of Monterey and chair of the Indiana Soybean Alliance.

“I deal with farmers all day long and then go home and farm myself,” she said.

She said many farmers couldn’t operate without a revolving line of credit to pay for growing season production costs until their harvests come in.

She and her husband, Mark, are third-generation farmers. “We are raising the fourth generation now.”

She said her 17-year-old daughter, Madison, loves showing livestock and a 13-year-old son, Parker, is a future farmer too.

“If it were up to him, (he) would be home schooled and would drive a tractor, which he does a lot after school and on the weekends,” Scarborough said.

Their La Porte County homestead, where they grow corn, soybeans and wheat, requires plenty of agribusiness services.

“I probably write 20 checks a month to all the local people our farm does business with,” she said.

Relationships are important in the agriculture business.

“We use Keystone Cooperative for our input and nutrients, and we also sell our grain to them. It’s a full circle place we do business with,” she said. “We have probably every color of farm equipment.”

They include Bane-Welker, Castongia Tractor and CLAAS.

“We send our soybeans to the Louis Dreyfus Co. crushing plant in Claypool, Indiana. All of our wheat goes to Ligonier,” she said, adding she wishes more agribusiness merchants would locate closer to Northwest Indiana to compete and offer to buy crops at higher prices.

Consumers near and far

Other services are available closer to home.

Chester Inc.’s ag systems are based in North Judson. They offer irrigation and grain handling systems.

“We build grain storage bins and dryers and center pivot irrigation systems,” said Charles Wilk, business development manager at Chester Inc. “We teach our clients how to use them and provide spare parts.”

Carrie Block, president of 1st Choice Insurance Services, grew up around Starke County’s farm community and has been writing policies to protect them for more than 30 years.

“We cover their buildings, field equipment, farm and grain trucks, their irrigation equipment, farming operation liabilities, like workers’ compensation and crop insurance against weather perils like drought, a hail storm or frost,” said the Knox resident.

Halderman said, in addition to cropland brokerage, his staff also manages 600-plus farms across Indiana for owners uninterested in cultivation.

“We find a tenant farmer, negotiate a lease, handle all the USDA programs, pay all the bills and deposit all the receipts,” Halderman said.

Dave Blower, of the Indiana Soybean Alliance and Indiana Corn Marketing Council, said the two marketing organizations work continually to find ways to make the crops into more lucrative products.

“The vast majority of it is used for livestock feed in-state,” he said. “A lot of grain goes to feed large duck farms up north, hogs and a lot of chickens.

“We partner with the U.S. Soybean Export Council, the U.S. Grains and BioProducts Council, the U.S. Meat Export Federation and the USA Poultry and Export Council to connect businesses overseas with Indiana corn and soybean growers.”

Dan Perkins of Perkins’ Good Earth Farm has been aiming at a consumer base closer to home since 2012 through his small, no-till, intensively cultivated acres of organic produce in DeMotte.

“I’m originally an East Coast city kid who studied environmental science in college. My plan was to go to law school and defend farmers who care for the earth,” he said. “I started working on their farms to know their lifestyle and fell in love with it.”

After college, he moved to DeMotte, bought land and got his hands dirty.

“We can offer organic produce at a reasonable price and make a middle-class income off of that, thanks to our high yields. We can raise up to 27 tons an acre of food,” he said. “Even though we are small, we are mighty.”

He said they employ about 12 people during the growing season, particularly “local young people who have an interest in agriculture.”

Last season, he grew vegetables and herbs — from arugula to sweet turnips — for his subscription service with about 200 people who pay in advance and go to his farm to claim their vegetables, just like our grandparents did.

“Everyone pretty much lives within 20 to 30 miles of the farm,” he said. “We love feeding our neighbors and the community.”

Perkins also is a vendor to restaurants, schools and the Northwest Indiana Food Bank. He found those business leads through Region Roots, a nonprofit local food hub, run by the NWI Food Council. Part of their mission is to connect small-scale farmers with wholesale market opportunities.

Virginia Pleasant, co-executive director of NWI Food Council, said her nonprofit works with beginning farmers.

“Beginning farmers are really passionate about growing food and getting it into the communities but may not have the business savvy or expertise to figure out ledgers and balance sheets involving the cost of production,” she said. “We sit down with those individuals and have a conversation about their goals to determine what technical assistance they need based on their business vision.”

The council also launched a farm apprenticeship program through Indiana’s Department of Labor. They help people interested in farming get hands-on experience in production and operations.

“We have 61 farmers enrolled in our food hub to connect them with thousands of consumers, which includes school children,” she said.

Farmwise Indiana, an Indiana University program, similarly helps local farmers and buyers.

Heather Tallman, Farmwise program coordinator, said their staff has developed 19 local buyers of Northwest Indiana raised crops and 44 local farm sellers and food buyers in St. Joseph, Elkhart and Marshall counties.

Trade war storms

Farmers’ profit margins have been threshed by inflated agribusiness costs while corn and soybean commodity market prices have fallen under the shadow of tariff disputes.

“We have felt the crunch of the trade wars,” Scarborough said.

Tom Murphy, district board director at the Indiana Corn Growers Association, tends rented parcels across Porter and Lake counties.

“Right now, to plant an acre of corn, you are in the hole about $200,” he said.

He offsets some of the commodity pain by growing specialty crops, like non-genetically modified corn that fetch higher prices from consumers preferring it as healthier and environmentally friendlier.

And precision agriculture technology helps keep him more efficient.

“We do fertility grids on every acre we farm,” Murphy said. “We got the data out of our harvest monitors from the combine. Our next step is going to be sitting down and figuring out fertility, nutrient and pesticide management during the wintertime.”

He said some fertilizers can cost over $1,000 a ton.

“Our soil is super marginal, with some nasty white clay up north. We have some black dirt in the middle and some sandy ground up by Lake Michigan,” he said. “Some farm areas need 300 to 400 pounds and others don’t need any.”

Mike Eason, parts manager for Castongia Tractor in DeMotte, said they feature John Deere’s HarvestLab.

“It’s a real-time record of your harvest,” he said. “Sensors in your combine record your yield amounts and the moisture. That tells them if they need to adjust their soil pH or fertilizer and other things that go into the soil and can even help pick the best seed.”

More farms are using newer technologies to access crops.

“It’s growing fast as the older farmers, who did it with a calculator (and) a piece of paper, retire and the next generation adopts new technology,” Eason said.

But technology may downsize part of Murphy’s farming operation because Amazon wants to build a data center that could swallow nearly a square mile of farmland within the City of Hobart.

“A big chunk of our farm is involved in the data center issue in Hobart. It sounds like that will be out of production for sure,” Murphy said.

Scarborough said times might be trying now, but there is always hope for the future.

“We feel very fortunate for the opportunities we’ve had over the years to grow our operation, and I couldn’t imagine raising my children any other way,” she said. •

Read more stories from the current issue of Northwest Indiana Business Magazine.

Bill Dolan
William Patrick “Bill” Dolan was born and raised in New Albany, where the attended and graduated from New Albany High School in 1967. He attended Indiana University Southeast in Jeffersonville and graduated at Indiana University Bloomington in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He was a staff writer for The Post-Tribune from 1972 to 1997, covering feature news, local government and Lake County criminal courts in Crown Point. He was a staff writer from 1997 until his retirement in 2019 at The Times of Northwest Indiana, covering Crown Point schools, U.S. District Court in Hammond and Lake County government, as well as feature and business writing. He has made his home in Northwest Indiana since 1972, with his wife, Mary Sue (Skees) Dolan, and their children Marissa (Dolan) Gale and Sean Dolan.
View all posts