Two Indiana stories have grabbed the attention of the Tumbledown Farmer in the past few weeks. The first contained the news that an Amish popcorn plant sits atop the government's watch list of state terror sites. (The National Asset Database. Perhaps the list was alphabetized? See the front page article in the Indianapolis Star, July 13, 2006.) Brian Lehman, the astonished owner of the popcorn concern, said "I don't have a clue why we're on the list. We're on a gravel road, not even blacktop. We're nowhere" (ibid.) The second story percolated for months in the news, at first merely as a rumor, then as a competition between small towns in Indiana and Ohio to land the next auto manufacturing plant. The reward for selling farms that had been in families for 5 generations was the promise of 750 manufacturing jobs (and millions of dollars, many times the going rate per acre for agricultural land). "Indiana lost 93,000 acres of farmland a year from 1997 through 2002, accelerating a decline stretching back 60 years" (Indianapolis Star, "Green Acres," April 30, 2006; 165 square miles between 1978 and 1992, a chunk the size of Blackford County, ibid., editorial, "State must protect precious farmland"). "Progress" in the form of a Honda plant has put rural Southeastern Indiana in the crosshairs in a way that no terrorist could ever hope to do. And Hoosiers have been complicit in the paving over of the farmland. Is it any wonder that we have inherited a Tumbledown Farm?
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