Filed neatly within the seemingly endless rows of corn and soybeans, and between the neatly gridded county roads that surround the small town of Converse, a field of sunflowers dries under the September sun. They no longer stand tall, bright and yellow, following the sun through the sky. Instead, the sunflowers look toward the ground and dry as they await the next step in their journey — a cold-pressed sunflower oil known as Healthy Hoosier Oil.

Mark Boyer is a sixth-generation farmer, and the owner of Healthy Hoosier Oil. Although he is the face behind the business, growing sunflowers was not his idea – he credits that to his late father, Craig Boyer.

“About 12 or 13 years ago, agriculture was looking kind of scary. Commodity crop prices were pretty scary, and we were looking for an avenue to diversify our crops and provide security for generations to come,” he said. “So we grew some sunflowers in a small plot, and we were at least successful enough to try and continue that and scale up.”

They were one of the earliest producers that joined the Indiana Grown initiative, which was founded by the Indiana State Department of Agriculture in 2015 to promote agricultural products made in Indiana. After expanding operations to include storage and manufacturing facilities, the initiative helped them connect with other vendors and take their product to the next level.

“We engaged in [the Indiana Grown] program not really knowing where it was going to take us. So, we started doing food shows, and got to meet great Indiana-made, local products that in many cases I didn’t even realize existed,” he said. “We got to rub shoulders, and kind of compare notes, and that was tremendously beneficial in establishing a market for our product.”

One of the unique parts about the initiative, according to Boyer, is the eagerness for collaboration between vendors. Through the Indiana Grown program, he began producing products with Bastin Honey Bee Farms, Brick House Vinaigrettes, and Fairmount Candle and Bath. The honey bees pollinate his sunflowers and produce honey, his sunflower oil is the base ingredient in Brick House Vinaigrettes, and Fairmount Candle and Bath makes a line of hand soaps and bath products using the oil.

“Many of these vendors did not have a real clear path to a retail store shelf where a consumer could get their hands on their product,” Boyer said. “And we were having kind of the same struggles early on, so we decided to open a retail location highlighting those products and be of some benefit.”

The retail store is called Rachel’s Taste of Indiana, a store where every product on the shelf has a story to be told – a story set within Indiana’s borders. He and his wife, Rachel, own the store and carry products from breading mixes to pork to pickles, all made in Indiana.

“What has happened, more by accident than by design, is that we’ve created a small-town, ag-based economy based right here in Converse, which is really unique,” Boyer said.

Retail isn’t the only part of the agriculture-based economy Boyer has helped create in Converse. He says Big Dipper, an ice cream shop and restaurant next to Rachel’s Taste of Indiana, uses their sunflower oil in their deep fryers. On the other side of their retail store is Jefferson Street BBQ, which serves Hunt Family Farms pork, fed with Boyer’s sunflower meal.

During the blooming season, the store receives as many as five thousand visitors, who come from as far as Chicago and Cincinnati to take in the spectacle of his 750,000 sunflowers, according to Boyer. And although he may be focused more on his agricultural product than the sunflowers’ beautiful blooms, growing the sunflowers has been a rewarding experience.

“After being a corn, soybean and wheat farmer for literally decades and decades, it’s kind of fun to grow a crop that brings people joy,” he said. “I really enjoy seeing that.”

In 1990, Ken Licklider started his dog training business, Vohne Liche Kennels, in his living room. 600 acres, three countries, and two states later, he is adding another facility to his portfolio – the former Miami County YMCA building on the corner of Sixth and Wabash Street.

Licklider’s vision for the building is to become a residential training facility for dogs and their handlers, who already come to Vohne Liche Kennels from around the world. Licklider says Vohne Liche has provided training to handlers from Ecuador, South Korea, and Algeria.

It took a hopeful eye to see the potential in the building, though. Danny Parker and Rodney Correll, who are in charge of the project, said the building was in a state of disarray when they first walked through it; old furniture sitting in barren rooms, plumbing damaged after the fixtures were ripped from the wall, doors removed from their frames, and banisters cut off the stairwells.

“You had to look under all the mess they’d made and look into the future. I mean look at this,” Licklider said, gesturing to the common area. “I’ve been a dog handler my whole life and I’ve never had anything like this. They can sit around here, they’ve got a card table around the corner, a pool table in there. I’ve never had anything like this.”

Danny Parker said there had been multiple ideas for how the building could be repurposed while the YMCA was searching for a buyer, but none were willing to put in the investment to keep the building from deteriorating further. He said the building would have likely been demolished and made into a parking lot if they hadn’t purchased it.

The facility, once finished, will have 18 dormitories for dogs and their trainers, several common areas, a gym that will be open to the public while not in use, and a pool. Licklider says he is excited not only for the impact it will have on his training business, but the impact it will have on the city.

“Think about what the town’s going to gain. These guys are going to eat at these restaurants. These guys are going to have a few beers. They’re going to shop. This town is going to gain so much from this place,” Licklider said.

Licklider’s business now spans across the world – dogs he has trained have served in police and military forces across the country and even abroad.

“It’s the greatest feeling in the world. When we go somewhere, they know who we are. When I teach, I’ll have 500 people in my room. It’s a good feeling,” he said.

Miami County officials are distancing themselves from the county’s recycling provider after an investigation by the city found that the collected materials were no longer recyclable, had ignited three times, and were at risk of igniting for a fourth after being stored improperly, according to Peru Mayor Miles Hewitt.

Concerns from the city began after bales of collected recycling material began piling up at Recycling Recovery on North Broadway Street. According to Jenny Gatliff, executive director of the Miami County Recycling District, the company has been paid roughly $13,000 per month since 2011 to provide and service recycling collection boxes across the county.

Michael Rorvik, owner of Recycling Recovery, said the bales began collecting after the market for recyclable materials flipped about two and half years ago – instead of making profit off the materials he was collecting, he began paying to have them recycled.

“We took the material, we still processed it and sorted all the trash out of it, and we baled up the commodities and stored it until the market either came back or, you know, obviously it was building on me and I couldn’t get rid of it,” Rorvik said.

Mayor Hewitt said Erick Hawk, fire department chief, began investigating the company after a fire in Richmond, Ind. occurred at a facility that stored plastics. That fire forced residents within a half-mile radius of the facility to evacuate the area for five days – Mayor Hewitt said a fire of that scale at Recycling Recovery’s facility would cause the hospital and most of the city to evacuate.

The city presented their findings to the Miami County Recycling District Board at their meeting on May 15, which included drone photos showing approximately 3,000 bales of collected materials that had been stored outside Recycling Recovery’s building and posed an “extreme potential fire hazard,” according to Hawk.

However, Rorvik disagrees that the way he was storing the materials was unsafe.

“I don’t want to say that there was a safety hazard, in that there’s always a risk of anything that’s stored outside that somebody may be able to do something to light on fire,” he said.

Rorvik said the three previous fires had been caused by a cigarette that had blown into the facility, an employee who accidentally set a piece of wood on fire while trying to remove metal from a bale, and an ashtray that was emptied into a collection box.

“It’s a minimal risk, and you know people in every case did something that they shouldn’t do and didn’t think it through before they did it. But they were just careless incidents”, Rorvik said.

Mayor Hewitt says the building department contacted a recycling center in Kokomo to inspect the material that had been collected by Recycling Recovery, and had concluded that the material was “non-usable and was going to have to go to the landfill.” Ron Dausch, building commissioner, said the bales of collected material were mixed with trash and toxins.

Rorvik says his plan has always been for the materials to be recycled, but challenges in the recycling industry created setbacks he couldn’t overcome.

“I went to the director of the solid waste recycling district and said, ‘Listen, this isn’t working for me, and we need to do something with this program to sustain it,’” Rorvik said.

The solutions suggested to the previous director, Samantha St. John, included switching from single-stream recycling to source-separated recycling, increasing the budget by raising fees, reducing the frequency and complexity of the service, or creating a grant program to attract more funding.

Rorvik says he regrets not exiting the contract sooner after no solutions were implemented.

“I really should have insisted that if they weren’t going to put more money into the program, I should have put a stop to it a long time ago and insisted that it go back out to bid…” Rorvik said.

After the city presented the findings of their investigation at the recycling district’s meeting, the board terminated Recycling Recovery’s contract and notified Rorvik that his services were no longer needed via text message.

“There’s been a problem for two and a half years. Everybody that was involved knew it, and then all of a sudden, bam. They just put a bullet in me one day and sent a text message, you know, ‘Your services are no longer needed, pull your box effective today,’” Rorvik said.

The most recent contract between the Miami County Recycling District and Recycling Recovery expired Dec. 31, 2013. However, neither party has a copy of the agreement that would have contracted Recycling Recovery to continue offering their services to the county past 2013.

Gatliff says the previous director did not put a new contract in place, and Rorvik says he is unable to find a copy of the contract he was operating under. According to Gatliff, Rorvik has continued being paid for his services since 2013. He maintains that the contract he signed would continue to roll over every year unless he was notified otherwise.

Brenda Weaver, Miami County Commissioner, says the recycling district has signed a new contract with Waste Away, which is based in Elkhart, to provide recycling services to the county. Rorvik says he is relieved to be done with the contract.

“The fact that I’m not doing it anymore, frankly, is a huge relief because I’m not having to subsidize out of my own pocket what wasn’t working for the program overall,” he said.

Mayor Hewitt says the city took action because he believes the materials were not being recycled like they were supposed to, and was a potential hazard.

“We had to do something because the recycling part of it was not being done as it was supposed to be. To me, recycling means you recycle everything. You don’t store garbage that’s bundled up in the big bales that are sitting out there,” he said.

Rorvik maintains that the material was always going to be recycled, and says the city never asked the right questions or tried to figure out a solution.

“There’s plenty of faults to go around. I assume responsibility for my part, but the one thing I would tell you is that I never threw away anything that was intended to be recycled, because it’s my intention to recycle it,” he said. “I could have disposed of it and not had this problem, but that’s not what I did. I held onto it because it’s mine, and it has a value to it.“

Behind the story:

This story began with a conversation I overheard at a gas station. The cashier told a friend on the phone that she was working evenings to pay for her child’s daycare while she worked her day job.

When I began researching, I found that families in Delaware County pay more than Ball State University’s in-state tuition to send their children to daycare.

One of my passions is exploring how data can tell stories, but I knew that this issue was intensely human. When I began talking to parents, I learned how frustrating it was to find openings. When I talked to educators, I learned how important early learning is to them, but how burnt out they had become.

For the final story, I created page layouts, data visualizations, and illustrations.

Walking into the Mitchell Early Childhood and Family Center, visitors may notice a few things that are not typical of daycares. All the doors are propped open; walls and tables outside rooms are filled with art crafted from twigs, pinecones and rocks; children roam freely around the classroom; the playground is filled with logs and wooden spools.

Jennifer Young is an associate lecturer at Ball State University’s Department of Early Childhood, Youth and Family Studies and the campus liaison for the Mitchell Center. The center opened in 2019 at the former site of Mitchell Elementary School as a partnership between Ball State and the YMCA of Muncie.

The Mitchell Center’s unique approach to early learning, a style called the Reggio Emilia approach, is the source of many of those unique qualities.

“The Reggio Emilia style has an emphasis on respect for children,” Young said. “So children are really in charge of their own learning.”

Haley Butcher, a fourth-year family and child major at Ball State, first learned about the Mitchell Center through an infant and toddler development course that was held at the center’s lab school. After the class ended, she decided to apply for a part-time job there. Through her experiences there, Butcher learned that even though working with young children can be rewarding, it can also be difficult.

“I love it so much, but I didn’t realize how much of an emotional impact that it would have on me,” Butcher said. “Just knowing that with these kids, you’re teaching them everything from scratch.”

One of the challenges Young faces is keeping staff energized and connecting staff members. She said that they regularly plan pitch-in dinners, hold celebrations for big life events and give staff their birthdays off.

“It’s very draining, and when people get drained, they need the opportunity to be filled back up again,” Young said. “So this type of work is really work that needs multiple supports on a lot of different levels.”

In Indiana, child care providers are rated on the Paths to QUALITY scale, which assigns levels from one to four. Level one providers meet basic health and safety requirements, while level four providers are nationally accredited.

The Mitchell Center is rated level four under Indiana’s Paths to QUALITY program and accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. These advanced accreditations have stricter requirements, which can make finding qualified staff more difficult. 

“There was a time period where we just really didn’t have people who are qualified to work in this field,” Young said.

Because the Mitchell Center is a lab school, Young said they rely on students like Butcher from Ball State, Ivy Tech and the Muncie Area Career Center to volunteer at the center as part of their course work. During the beginning of COVID-19, when classes went online, the Mitchell Center lost that help. Young also said the pandemic was difficult for those who worked through it.

“This is hard work to be in this field, and you need people that are physically-able, mentally-able, socially-able and emotionally-able to work with young children and their families,” she said. “The mental, emotional and social toll of COVID[-19] has really impacted us.”

Child care providers aren’t the only ones who have been affected by staff shortages. For parents, it can make an already daunting search even more difficult.

Isaiah Kimp, a second-year social studies teaching major at Ball State, called the Mitchell Center in March 2022 to add himself to their waitlist, just a month after he found out his girlfriend, Marisela Rodriguez, was pregnant.

Kimp’s son, Khepri, is now 7 months old and is still on the waitlist for the Mitchell Center. When the fall semester started in August 2022, Kimp had to scramble to find an opening at another provider so he and his girlfriend could start the semester.

“It became very frustrating when we both started class,” Kimp said. “What’s upsetting is that Muncie has daycares, but every day care has a waitlist, and my biggest challenge was trying to figure out how long each waitlist was.”

Chances and Services for Youth (CASY) is the child care resource and referral center that serves 24 counties in central Indiana, including Delaware County. Kristi Burkhart is the director of CASY’s child care resource and referral center, and Jennifer Lee is a community engagement specialist. Lee said staff shortages are one factor that is currently challenging child care providers in the area.

“Child care providers are needing staff. And because they are lacking staff, they are not able to fill the seats that they normally would — so the licensed capacity numbers are not being met right now,” she said.

Licensed capacity is an estimate of the amount of children each provider can care for while staying compliant with licensing standards. For example, there must be one caregiver for every four infants, and no more than eight infants per classroom. According to the Indiana Business Research Center, the number of child care workers still has not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Unlike your gas station or your retail store where you might be able to work a little short-handed, child care is not one of those places,” Burkhart said.

When child care providers can’t meet capacity, Lee said parents are forced to search for other options. At CASY, Burkhart and Lee both help families deal with these situations on a daily basis. But it’s not just a job to them — it’s personal.

“We all have families, we’re all parents, we’ve all raised kids or have kids, and so we know the situation these families are in, and we know what it’s like looking for care,” Burkhart said.

A large part of the work CASY and other agencies do is helping families find assistance with the cost of child care. According to Muncie BY5 Coalition, families in Delaware County pay an average of $10,731 each year to provide a child with high-quality childcare — more than Ball State’s annual in-state tuition, which is estimated to be $10,440 without room and board fees for the 2022-23 school year.

Prices vary widely based on the quality of care. According to Brighter Futures Indiana, the average cost of infant and toddler care from a level one provider is $8,727 annually and $12,245 for level three and four providers, which is considered “high-quality” child care.

For low-income families, assistance is available through Indiana’s Child Care Development Fund (CCDF). Eligibility varies, but generally families whose income is more than 27 percent  below the federal poverty line are able to get help paying for child care while they are working, searching for a job or pursuing education. These vouchers are what help offset the cost of child care for Kimp and his son.

“Whatever the voucher doesn’t cover, me and his mom pay out of pocket for,” Kimp said. “And I never mind spending money on his child care because his child care is just as important as our needs.”

Burkhart said while finding care for children is a necessity, it can also be a difficult process for parents.

“In a lot of instances, families are looking for care for the first time, and they’re leaving their child with someone that they don’t know,” she said. “So our hearts go out to every one of these families we work with, and we just want to find the best solutions we can for them.”

For students like Kimp who have children, high-quality child care can give them the peace of mind to focus on their studies and their future.

“I’m going to do what I can to make sure … he’s taken care of by people who are trained and know what they’re doing, and as long as he’s safe and taken care of, I can go to class and focus on what I have to do to maintain what we have,” Kimp said.