Jud Vaught's family has lived on this land in Franklin for more than five generations. He and his brother bought the farm from their parents in 1978.
Together they raise 1100 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat. Farming has been good to Vaught and he's been able to put two kids through college.
"Sometimes, you'll have more money that you thought you would, and other times you'd not."
But it always balanced out.
It's a different story now; the agricultural industry is suffering. A USDA report shows that as the cost of farming rises, profits are going down.
Vaught's brother recently retired, meaning not only does all the work of running the farm fall on Vaught's shoulders, but so does the risk.
Farmers enjoyed an economic boom from 2006 to 2014 because of increased demand for products such as corn and soybeans.
But today, farmers are struggling to just break even.
"About the time we got to about 2013, 2014, supply had really increased substantially, and then were in a period of slowing down the rate of increase in demand," says Chris Hurt, Purdue University agricultural economist. "Our projections are that we will see multiple years of decline that prices won't be able to improve a lot over the next 3 years, and that cost of production will have to come down."
That means farmers will have to make a decision – try to weather the downturn and hope for better days, or cut their losses.
We're analyzing on our farm every penny that we're spending.
"Where do you squeeze the pennies out?" says Randy Kron, Indiana Farm Bureau president. "What can we do different to be more efficient? You know, whether it's no-till, save on fuel costs, cut back."
Kron also farms his own land, and says he's suffered major losses this year because of flooding last summer.
"We're analyzing on our farm every penny that we're spending to try and figure out how, where we save pennies because they'll add up. That's how we're going to survive."
We put off a lot of projects that we frankly couldn't finance the same time we were doing other things.
Crop insurance and federal commodities provide some security from devastating losses, but Kron says ultimately a farmer's survival right now depends on more efficient farm management
That's something Vaught says he's been mindful of through the years.
"We bought used equipment, shopped for it off lots, machinery lots and at auctions, went to no-till for fuel savings and savings in tillage tools, and that saved us soil as well. We put off a lot of projects that we frankly couldn't finance the same time we were doing other things."
And Vaught's coming up with an exit strategy; he's going to follow in his brother's footsteps soon and retire within the next 5 years.
But he worries about what's going to happen to the industry. He says the younger generation sees the rapidly changing agriculture markets as dangerous and a risky lifestyle choice
"I think that's one of the reasons that neither set of kids never took up the interest in farming. Because they say it as 'Dad and Uncle Bill are at the craps tables' or something. It was just, they couldn't understand how things could fluctuate that much."
