The smell reached County Road 7 before the first truck finished unloading.
It was sour, sweet, acidic, fermented, and so thick in the damp April air that people driving past instinctively rolled up their windows.
By noon on the second Tuesday of April 1992, a convoy of commercial dump trucks had backed across the edge of an abandoned five-acre parcel on the western outskirts of Knox County, Indiana.
One after another, hydraulic beds rose toward the gray sky.
Then the waste came sliding out.
Not tomatoes anyone would have eaten.
Not damaged produce that could be sorted and salvaged.
This was industrial processing residue from the Midwest Canning Corporation: crushed skins, seeds, pulp, acidic juice, stems, fragments of overripe fruit, and thick red slurry that had spent days fermenting inside factory holding tanks.
By the time roughly fifty tons had been deposited across Cole Evans's land, the five acres looked less like a farm than the aftermath of some agricultural disaster.
Steam rose faintly from several of the piles.
Flies arrived almost immediately.
The smell intensified as the afternoon warmed.
Neighbors gathered along the gravel shoulder.
Some covered their noses with handkerchiefs.
Others simply stood there staring.
By three o'clock, twenty-two complaints had been logged with county offices.
A sheriff's deputy had been sent to make sure nobody was dumping hazardous waste illegally.
A township official arrived carrying a citation book.
And half the farming community in western Knox County had found some excuse to drive down County Road 7.
At the center of it all stood twenty-two-year-old Cole Evans.
He wore an old brown canvas jacket that had belonged to his grandfather, work jeans faded nearly white at the knees, and leather boots with grease permanently darkening the toes.
He was not smiling.
He was not arguing either.
Mostly, he watched the trucks.
Whenever another load came down, Cole made a small mark on a clipboard.
Arthur Vance arrived shortly after one.
Everyone noticed.
It was difficult not to.
Vance's new dual-cab pickup was polished black and large enough to make Cole's battered Chevrolet look like farm equipment from another century.
Arthur Vance was fifty-one years old and farmed more tomatoes than anyone else within a hundred miles.
Six thousand acres under contract in Indiana and Illinois.
Commercial hybrids.
Mechanical harvesters.
Computer-controlled irrigation.
Fungicide schedules coordinated with consultants.
Processing contracts with several national food companies.
When growers around Knox County wanted to know what industrial tomato agriculture looked like, they pointed toward Arthur Vance.
He parked partly in the road, stepped from the cab, and stared across the crimson mess.
Then he laughed.
It began as a low chuckle.
Within seconds, it became a full-bodied laugh loud enough for everyone nearby to hear.
"Well," he said, shaking his head, "the boy finally lost his mind."
Several growers laughed with him.
Cole kept watching the trucks.
Arthur walked closer to the fence.
"You know what that is, don't you?"
Cole looked over.
"Tomato waste."
"No, son. That's a disposal problem."
More laughter.
Arthur pointed toward the field.
"Midwest Canning was facing thousands in disposal and transportation costs, and you let them dump it here for free."
Cole nodded.
"Yes."
Arthur blinked.
The simplicity of the answer amused him even more.
"You understand they usually pay to get rid of this?"
"Yes."
"And you charged them nothing?"
"No."
"Lord."
Arthur turned toward the men standing behind him.
"Anybody need five acres of maggots next month?"
The laughter grew.
Cole finally folded his clipboard.
Arthur called again.
"What's the plan, Cole? You farming tomatoes or flies?"
Cole looked across the piles.
"Tomatoes."
For a moment, nobody answered.
Then Arthur laughed harder than before.
That sentence became the joke of the week.
The Knox County Herald ran a photograph of the property on Friday.
The headline read:
THE GREAT TOMATO LANDFILL OF KNOX COUNTY
The accompanying article was less vicious than the headline, but not by much.
It described Cole as a "young would-be farmer experimenting with unconventional waste disposal" and quoted two nearby landowners who were worried about odor, insects, runoff, and falling property values.
The township trustee issued a formal warning.
Cole had thirty days to incorporate or remove the organic waste.
If the material remained exposed in a way that created a nuisance or environmental hazard, county crews could intervene and bill him for cleanup.
Cole signed the citation.
Folded his copy.
Put it inside his jacket.
He offered no public explanation.
That silence convinced many people he had no explanation.
To understand why Cole was willing to endure the smell, the ridicule, and the risk, someone would have needed to know two things.