Driving south from Chicago, it only takes about 25 miles to hit the corn fields. For the next 150 miles to Decatur, it's a sea of yellow corn tassles, a head tall.
At night, the central Illinois darkness is broken only by the lights of the corn and soy processing facilities at Archer Daniels Midland Company.
At dawn, the truck and rail traffic starts rolling in.
(Truck sounds)
ADM is one of the largest food processing companies in the world. Its global sales were $62 billion last year. Its headquarters are in Decatur, as well as some of its largest processing facilities. Its operations are so large that to tour all their plants I had to get in a car.
(Driving ambi)
ADM doesn't grow crops like what surrounds its operations in Decatur. It buys and sells crops - wheat, corn, soy and cocoa, from all over the world. Some of those crops are brought to processing plants, where they're turned into products like corn syrup, vegetable oil, animal feed, or ethanol.
Mike Baroni is a vice-president with the company:
Mike: This is the center of agriculture, and I joke a little, because it's the center because we're here. But if you look around, when you drove from Chicago you saw some of the most fertile land in the world, and corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.
The company started its first plant in Decatur in 1939. Thirty years later, it moved its headquarters to Decatur, too.
Mike: We've been here a long time, it's become our home.
ADM has almost 4500 workers in Decatur. While many work in the processing plant, the company also runs one of the largest private trading floors in the country and does a lot of scientific research.
Ryan McGrady is Decatur's City Manager.
McGrady: We have a rich history of industry, so I think a lot of folks think we're a dusty, old, blue collar city. And it's quite the contrary.
When you talk about employers in Decatur three names loom large: ADM, Caterpillar and Tate & Lyle, the British food giant that bought Decatur's homegrown Staley Company in 1988.
But Tate & Lyle recently announced its moving some research operations to the Chicago area.
And Caterpillar's employment has been more cyclical. Over the past few years, it has laid off, and since rehired, hundreds of Decatur workers.
ADM's been steady. Last fall, it bought a building in downtown Decatur to consolidate 300 IT, audit and accounting workers.
McGrady says that was a big deal.
Ryan: First of all, to have all that many more people in your central business district is going to be great for commerce. But bigger than that was a sign of ADM's commitment to Decatur by buying this building, especially in this age of downsizing.
The unemployment rate in Decatur has dropped below 9 percent. McGrady says Decatur sales tax revenues are up 10 to 15 percent over the past year. That's a faster rate of growth than Illinois as a whole.
(Welding)
With job prospects good in Decatur, welding classes are full at Richland Community College.
Douglas Brauer is a vice-president with the college:
"Everybody seems to be in more of a hiring mode"
For spring semester the school started offering welding classes at midnight, to accommodate students who were working full-time. The class was full, so they offered it again this summer.
Richland Community College is literally in ADM's backyard. When it was built, ADM built a pipeline to the campus to send steam. That's what's powered the college's heating and cooling systems for the past 20 years.
I stepped outside with Andy Perry, who also works at Richland.
Andy: "We are directly north of one of the production facilities for Archer Daniels Midland, or ADM and we are adjacent by maybe a little bit north and east of Tate and Lyle. So on a given day when some of those production facilities are giving off you know steam and other elements of product we can smell the products from here."
Perry says nobody in Decatur minds.
Andy: Really, it's the smell of money.
The world's population is expected to reach 6 billion people by 2050. That means the demand for agricultural products - everything ADM produces - is supposed to double. That can only mean good things for Decatur, which likes to call itself the heart of agribusiness.
For Changing Gears, I'm Niala Boodhoo.
