Cole rejected most requests.
That surprised Marcus Thorne.
"You understand people are offering to pay you."
"I understand."
"Then why no?"
"Because if we take ten trials we can't manage, we produce ten bad datasets and lose the thing they're paying for."
Marcus leaned back in his chair.
"I wish more executives understood capacity as well as a twenty-five-year-old farmer."
"I'm twenty-six."
"That changes everything."
Cole smiled.
He hired a research agronomist, a seed pathologist, two field technicians, and eventually a full-time compost operations manager. He purchased neighboring parcels when they became available, but expansion remained gradual.
Five acres became nineteen.
Nineteen became forty-seven.
By the end of the seventh year, the company managed or owned nearly four hundred acres across several parcels, though not all were planted to tomatoes and not all were treated with processing residuals.
Some acreage remained in rotation. Some carried seed crops. Some existed primarily for soil research and compost feedstock production.
The number four hundred acres entered magazine stories because it sounded impressive.
Cole preferred another number.
Forty-two.
That was the number of local year-round and seasonal jobs the operation supported by then, excluding outside trucking and contract services.
Clara had once written that a farm was not healthy if the land improved while everyone working it became disposable.
Cole kept that page framed in the employee break room.
He did not become anti-technology.
That was another myth attached to him.
Evans Bioworks used soil sensors, weather stations, automated seed dryers, optical sorting equipment, digital traceability, and laboratory diagnostics Clara would have loved. The company occasionally used targeted conventional crop-protection tools when disease risk justified them. Mineral amendments were applied when soil tests called for them.
What Cole resisted was dependency without understanding.
He did not want a farm that remained productive only so long as an expensive chain of purchased inputs arrived exactly on time and nobody ever asked whether local waste streams, rotations, biology, or structure could do part of the work better.
He called it optionality.
Arthur called it "not owing every salesman in three counties."
They meant nearly the same thing.
The first major setback came in year four.
A compost batch made from tomato residual and spoiled grain developed excessive salinity because the grain material carried more mineral residue than supplier paperwork indicated. The batch passed an early visual inspection but failed Cole's final conductivity test.
It represented months of material and thousands of dollars in handling.
An operations supervisor suggested blending it into larger volume until the reading fell within average specification.
Cole refused.
"The salt doesn't disappear because the spreadsheet gets bigger," he said.
The entire batch was redirected to a use where the nutrient profile could be managed safely under agronomic guidance.
They lost money.
The decision later became a training case inside the company.
Cole kept a photograph of that rejected pile beside the old Herald clipping.