They called it the worst farm in the county. He paid $3,200 and saw what they missed. Everyone said the land was finished — tired soil, broken fences, bad drainage, and fields that had embarrassed every owner before him. At the auction, farmers laughed when he raised his hand, certain he had just bought someone else’s failure. But he wasn’t looking at what the farm had been. He was reading what the land could still become with patience, timing, and work nobody else wanted to do. Then the first harvest came in. They thought he bought dead ground. He had bought the comeback nobody believed in.
On a Thursday morning in March of 1959, on the courthouse steps in Greensburg, Indiana, a twenty-four-year-old farmhand named Owen Selke paid $3,200 for eighty acres everyone else had already decided were worthless.
The county assessor used careful language.
Marginal to nonproductive.
That was the polite version. Farmers in Decatur County had their own names for it: the Burroughs parcel, the mud pit, the sinkhole, Selke’s folly. Some of them started using that last one before Owen had even signed the deed.
And looking at the land, you could understand why.
The eighty acres sat low between two creeks on the southeastern side of the county, where the ground seemed designed to trap every rain that fell on it. In a normal year, half the acreage held standing water from February through May. In a wet year, nearly forty acres turned into a shallow lake that did not fully recede until July. The soil was heavy Brookston clay, the kind that clung to boots in six-inch slabs when wet and baked hard as brick when dry. A twelve-acre patch of scrub timber stood in the northwest corner, untouched since the Burroughs family had stopped trying to clear it in 1947. The access road, if a man was generous enough to call it a road, was a quarter mile of ungraded mud that became impassable for four months of the year.
Emmett Burroughs had tried to farm it for nineteen years.
He planted corn whenever he could get equipment onto the ground, which happened about three years out of five. In the other two years, the water sat too long, the planting window closed, and he lost the season before it began. In the years he managed to plant, he averaged about forty-five bushels an acre, not terrible for that era, but nowhere near enough to survive the lost years, repairs, delays, and taxes.
He fell behind on taxes in 1953, caught up in 1955, fell behind again in 1956, and by 1958 the county had seized the place for $1,840 in back taxes.
The tax sale started at $2,000.
Two local farmers bid it up to $2,800, then stopped because both of them knew the ground too well to keep going. A speculator from Indianapolis raised it to $3,000, maybe thinking the timber alone might justify the risk someday.
Then Owen Selke, standing near the back of the crowd in mud-caked work boots and a patched denim jacket, raised one hand.
“Thirty-two hundred.”
No one topped him.
No one wanted to.
The county clerk struck the sale and looked at him over the paperwork.
“Eighty acres, $3,200. That’s forty dollars an acre, Mr. Selke. Good land in this county sells for two hundred.”
Owen signed the deed and paid with a cashier’s check.
Every dollar he had in the world.
Then he drove out to see his farm.
His farm.
Eighty acres of mud, clay, standing water, scrub timber, and other men’s failures. Eighty acres almost everyone in Decatur County believed would never produce a crop worth hauling to town.
That afternoon, Owen stopped at the Farm Bureau co-op in Greensburg to set up an account.
Bud Lister was behind the counter.
Bud ran the local John Deere franchise from the back half of the co-op building, a side business that had grown so large it nearly overshadowed the co-op itself. He was a big man with a loud laugh, a crushing handshake, and a memory that held every farmer in the county by acreage, machinery, debt habits, and preferred brand of seed.
“Owen Selke,” Bud said, reaching across the counter. “Heard you bought the Burroughs place. Congratulations, I think.”
He laughed at his own joke.
Owen shook his hand.
“So,” Bud said, leaning forward. “What’s the plan? You going to drain that swamp and make it farm?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, you’re going to need equipment. I’ve got a nice John Deere 730 on the lot right now. Diesel. Sixty horsepower. It’ll handle that clay if anything can. I can do $5,800 financed over—”
“I’ve got a tractor,” Owen said.
Bud stopped.
“You’ve got what?”
“A 1947 Farmall M. Bought it last fall from Henry Osman’s widow for $175.”
Bud’s smile faded by exactly the amount a man’s smile fades when he realizes a younger man is serious about something foolish.
“A $175 tractor.”
“Runs good.”
“Owen,” Bud said, putting both hands on the counter, “you just bought the worst piece of ground in Decatur County. Standing water half the year. Heavy clay. No drainage. A road you can’t use in spring. And you’re going to work it with a twelve-year-old Farmall that costs less than a decent used pickup.”
Owen said nothing.
“I’m saying this as a friend,” Bud continued. “You’re setting yourself up to fail.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely. I watched four men try to farm that ground. Four. Every one of them quit or went broke. It can’t be done. Not with that soil and that water. Emmett Burroughs lost twenty years of his life trying, and all he got was a tax bill he couldn’t pay.”
Owen picked up his co-op account paperwork.
“I appreciate the concern, Bud. But I’ve got a different idea about that ground.”
Bud narrowed his eyes.
“What idea?”
“You’ll see.”
That was all Owen said.
For the next two years, that was all anyone in Greensburg could talk about: Owen Selke’s different idea, and how long it would take for the Burroughs swamp to finish him the way it had finished everyone else.
Owen had not come to that land by accident.
He was born in 1935 in Rush County, one county east of Decatur. His father, Martin Selke, was a tenant farmer. He worked other people’s land his entire life and never owned an acre. Martin was not lazy and he was not careless. He was hard-working, disciplined, and unlucky in the particular way tenant farmers often were. He rented good ground and got drought. He rented poor ground and got floods. He moved the family five times in twelve years, chasing leases that looked promising in February and punished him by October.
But Martin Selke had one gift he passed to his son.
He understood water.
Not the way an engineer understands water from a textbook, but the way a man understands it after a lifetime of watching fields fail because they were either too wet or too dry. He could walk a piece of ground and tell where the water came from, where it wanted to go, and where it was being forced to stay. He read slope the way other men read newspaper headlines, seeing the whole story in contours, grass color, weed patches, damp seams, and creek edges.
“Water is the story,” Martin told Owen when Owen was fifteen. “Everything else—the soil, the seed, the weather—those are chapters. Water is the whole book. You control the water, you control the land. You lose the water, the land controls you.”
Martin died in 1953, when Owen was eighteen.
A tractor accident on a rented farm in Fayette County.
The owner sent condolences and then asked the family to vacate by the end of the month.
That was tenant farming. You lived on someone else’s ground, worked it like your own, and when death came through the door, your family had thirty days to disappear.
Owen swore he would never rent.
He would own land, or he would not farm at all.
For six years, he worked as a hired hand across east-central Indiana, saving every dollar he could. He studied every field he worked. He watched where water stood after rain. He watched which low spots dried early and which ones stayed sour into June. He watched fields other men dismissed and asked himself whether the problem was the land itself or only the way the water moved through it.
He was not looking for good land.
He could not afford good land.
He was looking for ground with a problem he knew how to solve.
When he saw the Burroughs eighty advertised in the Greensburg Daily News—eighty acres, tax sale, marginal to nonproductive, standing water—he did not see a swamp.
He saw the book his father had taught him to read.
He saw water going wrong.
And he believed he knew how to correct it.
Owen did not plant a single crop in 1959.
Not one seed.
The neighbors drove past and saw the Burroughs eighty sitting empty. Standing water in the low fields. Weeds in the high patches. Scrub timber in the northwest corner. No corn. No beans. No visible progress.
To them, that proved what they already believed.
Selke’s folly.
The boy had thrown away $3,200 on a mud pit.
What they could not see from the road was what Owen was doing every day from sunrise until dark.
He was digging.
During the first week he owned the place, Owen walked every inch of those eighty acres. He studied the two creeks bordering the ground. He mapped the low spots where water collected. He pushed a steel rod into the soil every twenty feet across the worst sections, measuring the depth of the clay hardpan—the impermeable layer beneath the topsoil that trapped water like a bathtub with the drain plugged.
The problem, he realized, was not the soil.
The soil was excellent.
Brookston clay, once properly drained, could be some of the most productive farmland in Indiana.
The problem was that the hardpan sat about eighteen inches below the surface across much of the farm, and there was no natural outlet for the water collecting above it. The two creeks ran four to six feet below field level, but nothing connected the fields to those creeks. Rain fell, pooled above the hardpan, and sat there until heat and time finally pulled it away.
The water had nowhere to go.
Owen’s father had taught him the answer.
Tile drainage.
Clay tile. Four-inch terracotta pipes laid in trenches beneath the hardpan, graded so gravity would carry water from the fields into the creeks. It was not new technology. Indiana farmers had been tiling wet fields since the nineteenth century. But hiring it done was expensive, and Owen had spent almost everything on the deed.
So he did not hire anyone.
He did it himself.
With a shovel, a borrowed transit level from the county surveyor’s office, and the $175 Farmall M pulling a homemade ditching plow he built from a moldboard plow, a length of I-beam, and a piece of railroad rail.
He started in April 1959 and worked through November.
Then he started again in March 1960 and worked through October.
Two full years.
Seven days a week.
Sunrise to sunset.
Digging trenches three feet deep across sixty-eight acres of heavy clay.
Every trench was graded to a slope of roughly one inch per hundred feet so the water would move by gravity toward the creek outlets. Owen bought clay tile from a manufacturer in Shelbyville: 14,000 feet of four-inch tile at three cents per foot. The total came to $420, money he earned working weekends at a sawmill in Westport.
He laid every foot by hand.
On his knees in the trench, fitting section to section, setting the grade, covering the tile with gravel he hauled from a creek bed in his pickup, then backfilling with clay.
Fourteen thousand feet.
Nearly three miles.
One man.
Two years.
The neighbors did not know what he was doing. Some drove past and saw trenches cut through the fields and assumed he was running water lines or burying junk. Bud Lister heard a rumor that Owen was digging a pond.
Nobody guessed the truth, because nobody believed the truth was possible.
Nobody believed a man with a $175 tractor and a borrowed transit level could tile-drain sixty-eight acres by hand.
In the spring of 1961, Owen planted corn on the Burroughs eighty for the first time.
The crop came up in May like any other corn: thin, pale green, unremarkable.
By July, something was different.
The stalks on Owen’s place were darker than anyone remembered seeing on that ground. They were taller, thicker, steadier. The ears set heavier. Farmers driving the county road began slowing down when they passed. Some stopped. Some got out and stood near the fence line, staring across the field as if the crop had no business being there.
The Burroughs eighty—the mud pit, the sinkhole, Selke’s folly—was growing corn better than the good ground on either side of it.
The tile was working.
The water that had drowned crops for forty years was now moving underground through three miles of clay pipe, draining into the creeks exactly the way Owen had designed it. With the excess water removed, the Brookston clay did what Brookston clay does when it is allowed to breathe.
It produced.
Owen harvested in September.
He did not own a combine. He picked with the Farmall M pulling a two-row corn picker he had bought at a farm sale for $90. It took him three weeks to pick the whole field. When he hauled his grain to the elevator in Greensburg, the scale operator weighed the loads and calculated the yield.
Then he calculated it again.
One hundred twenty-seven bushels per acre.
The county average that year was seventy-two.
One hundred twenty-seven bushels per acre off the worst ground in Decatur County.
Nearly double the county average.
Off land the assessor had called marginal to nonproductive.
Off land four farmers had failed on.
Off land Bud Lister said could not be farmed.
The scale operator called his boss. His boss called the county extension agent. The extension agent drove out to the Burroughs eighty the following week and walked the fields with Owen.
When he saw the drainage outlets, the grades, the tile lines, and the clear water trickling steadily into the creek, he stood at the edge of the field and said five words.
“I have never seen this.”
Word spread through Greensburg like fire through dry husks.
By the weekend, farmers were driving out just to look at the crop. They stood at the fence with crossed arms, shaking their heads, trying to reconcile what they saw with what they had believed about that ground for twenty years.
Bud Lister drove out on Saturday afternoon.
He walked along the field edge. He looked at the corn. He looked at the drainage outlet where clear water flowed into the creek. Then he walked to the farmyard, where Owen was greasing the corn picker.
“Owen.”
“Bud.”
“How much did you yield?”
“One twenty-seven.”
Bud took off his cap and scratched his head.
“One hundred twenty-seven bushels off this ground.”
“Off this ground.”
“The best farm in this county made ninety-eight this year. You beat the best farm in the county by almost thirty bushels on the worst land.”
“It was never the worst land,” Owen said. “It was the worst drainage. The land was always good. Nobody looked past the water long enough to see what was underneath.”
Bud was quiet for a while.
He walked back to the fence line and stared across the field again. Then he came back.
“You tiled this whole thing yourself?”
“The Farmall did most of the digging,” Owen said. “I just aimed it.”
“The $175 Farmall.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bud Lister did something Owen had never seen him do.
He stopped talking.
He stood there with his John Deere cap in his hand, looking at a field of corn that had just rewritten what he thought he knew about land, equipment, and the cost of seeing clearly.
Finally, Bud said, “I owe you an apology.”
Owen looked at him.
“I told you this ground couldn’t be farmed,” Bud said. “I told you you were going to fail. I was wrong about the land, and I was wrong about you.”
Owen wiped grease from his fingers with an old rag.
“You were right about one thing. It couldn’t be farmed the way Emmett Burroughs farmed it. The water had to go somewhere. I just gave it somewhere to go.”
That first harvest was not the end.
It was the beginning.
Owen farmed the eighty acres with the Farmall M for the next nine years. He never took out a loan. He never financed equipment. He saved aggressively. The drained Brookston clay consistently produced 110 to 130 bushels per acre, sometimes higher, while the county average hovered much lower.
The math was extraordinary.
Eighty acres at 120 bushels per acre brought in roughly 9,600 bushels of corn. At average prices through much of the 1960s, Owen grossed around $10,000 a year. After seed, fertilizer, fuel, taxes, repairs, and household costs, he could still net about $7,000 in a good year on land he had bought for $3,200.
By 1970, Owen had more than $62,000 in savings.
He had also become known as the best drainage man in east-central Indiana.
Farmers who laughed at him in 1959 began hiring him to tile their fields. He charged far less than commercial drainage companies and worked evenings, weekends, and off-season windows between his own planting and harvest. He used the same Farmall M and the same homemade ditching plow, refining grades by eye, transit, and instinct.
The drainage side business brought in another $4,000 to $6,000 a year.
He still did not borrow.
He still did not buy a new tractor.
He still did not expand.
He controlled water and saved money.
Then the 1970s came.
Corn prices climbed. Land values rose. Farmers borrowed against rising equity, expanded operations, bought bigger tractors, and behaved as if corn prices had forgotten how to fall. Bud Lister’s expanded John Deere dealership sold new iron to men who wanted to believe the boom had changed the rules.
Owen did not join them.
Neighbors could not understand it anymore.
They no longer mocked him. He had proven too much for that. But they did not understand why he would not do more.
“Owen, with your drainage knowledge, you could farm a thousand acres.”
“You could be the biggest operator in the county.”
Owen always gave the same kind of answer.
“I could. But then I’d need a loan.”
When the farm crisis hit in the early 1980s, Owen Selke had $187,000 in savings and no debt of any kind.
At the peak, his eighty acres had been worth around $192,000, a sixtyfold return on his original purchase. When land values crashed, the farm was still worth far more than he had paid, but Owen was not selling.
He was buying.
Between 1983 and 1986, Owen purchased three adjacent parcels at foreclosure auctions, a total of 240 additional acres. All of it was poorly drained bottomland that nobody else wanted. He paid between $280 and $350 an acre, $76,800 total.
Cash.
Then he tiled every acre himself.
It took three years.
By 1989, all 320 acres were producing 120 to 140 bushels of corn per acre, making Owen Selke’s operation—the one built from the worst farm in the county—one of the highest-yielding farms in Decatur County.
Bud Lister’s dealership survived the farm crisis, but barely. He had overextended during the boom like nearly everyone else: too much inventory, too many loans to customers who could no longer pay, too many assumptions built on prices that did not hold. In 1985, he downsized, letting go of two mechanics and a salesman. He never fully recovered.
He retired in 1990 and sold the franchise to a group from Columbus.
The day before Bud’s retirement party, Owen drove to the dealership.
Bud was in the office packing boxes.
“Owen Selke,” Bud said, looking up. “Come to buy a John Deere finally?”
Owen smiled.
“Not today. I brought you something.”
He set a small paper bag on Bud’s desk.
Inside was a four-inch section of terracotta drainage tile. Broken. Stained with old clay. The same type Owen had laid fourteen thousand feet of in 1959 and 1960.
Bud picked it up carefully.
“What’s this for?”
“That’s from the first run I ever laid. Main line draining the East Forty. It cracked last fall, and I had to replace that section. Thirty years in the ground before it gave out.”
Owen paused.
“I thought you should have it. You were there at the beginning.”
Bud held the tile in both hands.
A piece of clay pipe.
Almost weightless.
And yet it represented everything.
“Thirty years,” Bud said quietly. “That tile lasted thirty years.”
“The land will last longer.”
Bud set the tile on his desk.
“You know what I think about sometimes?” he asked. “That day at the co-op in 1959. You told me you had a different idea about that ground. I should have asked what it was. Instead, I tried to sell you a tractor.”
“You were doing your job.”
“My job was selling equipment,” Bud said. “Your job was seeing what nobody else could see.”
He stood and shook Owen’s hand.
“I spent thirty years selling machines. You spent thirty years fixing the ground the machines worked on. I think you had the better idea.”
Owen Selke lived long enough to see the lesson become ordinary.
He retired from farming in 2004 and turned the operation over to his son Russell, who farmed the 320 acres with modern equipment but the same old philosophy.
Control the water first.
Everything else follows.
The original eighty acres still produces 140 to 160 bushels of corn per acre in strong years. The tile system Owen laid by hand has been replaced in sections over the decades, but the layout remains the same: the trenches, grades, outlets, and logic he surveyed with a borrowed transit level in 1959.
The Farmall M is still in the barn.
One of Owen’s granddaughters once asked what it was worth.
Owen thought about it for a while.
“I paid $175 for it in 1958,” he said. “I used it to tile 320 acres that produce hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of corn. So I’d say it was worth about $175, and also everything.”
The county assessor reclassified the Burroughs eighty in 1965.
The designation changed from marginal to nonproductive to prime farmland.
It is still classified that way today.
Same dirt.
Same clay.
Same ground Emmett Burroughs lost to back taxes.
Same ground Bud Lister said could not be farmed.
The only thing that changed was where the water went.
That was the difference between worthless land and priceless land.
About three feet of depth.
And three miles of clay pipe.
The soil did not change. The climate did not change. The location did not change. What changed was one man’s understanding of water, passed from a tenant farmer who never owned an acre to a son who bought the worst land in the county and turned it into the best.
Bud Lister looked at the Burroughs eighty and saw mud.
Owen Selke looked at it and saw Brookston clay with a drainage problem.
Same ground.
Two different pairs of eyes.
One man saw failure.
The other saw a farm waiting to happen.
Owen paid $3,200 for eighty acres of mud, standing water, scrub timber, and twenty years of other men’s failures. From that mud, he built 320 acres of prime farmland, a drainage business, a family legacy, and a lesson that outlasted every shiny tractor and every bank loan in Decatur County.
The worst farm in the county became the best investment anyone ever made.
All it took was a man who knew where the water was going and had the patience to show it the way.
