Nose on glass, a tiny boy stared into distant darkness from the window of an Indiana farmhouse, waiting for an orange glow. Fire-watch. If the boy spotted flames, the prize was a rumbling ride beside his father on a no-cab dozer through a landfill to bury the blaze.
Born to bootstrap and raised in the shadow of enterprising farmers, the boy took to competition like bulldog to bone. The boy was Jordan Caldwell. Over 25 years later, he is a composting king hellbent on ROI, with no grass under his feet. “I was put on this earth with a killer instinct,” he says. “I’m motivated by money, but driven by success.”
Riding risk and reward beyond the rows, Jordan proves the adage: One man’s trash is another’s treasure.
Where to begin with a most red-blooded, American tale? With a peculiar alchemy—gravel into gold.
Miles for Bushels
Creature of habit. Feet on floor at 4 a.m., seven days a week. Boots, jeans, button-up shirt, and ball hat. Pot of coffee with five shots of espresso dumped in the maiden cup. Out the door and in the truck before daybreak, hot on the scent of business opportunity, the same hunt of his grandfather 78 years on the rewind.
In 1946, Elmer Caldwell was wilting. At 25 years young, turning a wrench on the line at a Chrysler plant in central Indiana, he was desperate to farm, despite no background in agriculture. Catching wind of a basement-bargain 100 acres, Elmer pulled stakes and moved his wife and three children to a farm outside Morristown, roughly 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis in Shelby County.
With a drop of the plow, Elmer realized why his new land was cheap: The soil was loaded with rocks—gravid with gravel. He had bought ground in the heart of a 30’ elevation shift that stretched half a mile to the Big Blue River, a gash where a glacier crawled millennia in the past and left behind a wake of gravel and clay.
At the mercy of the era’s limited agriculture technology, and with bank loans heavy on his shoulder, Elmer couldn’t make a decent crop. With whispers and backhanded comments from the county crowd stinging his ears, Elmer could have tucked tail and bounced. He stayed.
Atop his pile of pebbles, searching for income beyond the rows, he spotted a wafer-thin lifeline: the county paid farmers to maintain roads. Elmer began spreading gravel to cover his corn losses, trading miles for bushels. He stayed a step ahead of the bankers, until his eldest son, Paul, returned from military service with an acquired skill—asphalt production.
“Dad, we have to turn this gravel into a real business and make money,” Paul said.
“Farming has to become second because our ground is no good.”
Elmer didn’t hesitate. “I’m in. Else we starve.”
The Peacock Killer
Pug mix and cold mix, Paul and Elmer fed asphalt to a hungry county with gravel pulled from massive holes across their farmland. A decade into the asphalt business, Paul caught scent of change. In the nearest communities to Morristown—the landfills were closing.
The Caldwell acreage, once deemed of minimal value, was coated in clay and ideal for waste work. In 1960, Paul seized the moment and cranked into the landfill business, packing his giant gravel pit holes with trash.
As the venture surged, Paul’s son, Dana, fresh out of high school, took over the landfill and spotted a weak link in the chain, urging Paul to extend into trucking and preempt any trash supply chokeholds. Paul declined.
Years later, the biggest hauler in the region peacocked into Paul’s office: “I bring all the trash in here. You guys are gonna sell out to me today. End of story.”
Paul was unphased by the swagger. “Get the f*** outta here. Don’t ever bring another load into my landfill.”
Tossing the big-stepping hauler out the door, Paul turned to Dana. “We’re not putting up with this bulls***, son. Go buy a truck. As of this minute, we’re in the hauling business.”
Riding Shotgun
Without so much as an I-told-you-so, Dana began with a single trash truck in the early 1980s, picking up waste at farms and rural houses. He quickly expanded to a fleet of vehicles with city contracts, front- and rear-loads, roll-offs, insulation hauls, and foundry sand.
Success bred success. Dana added food waste and industrial filter cake recycling, as well as cattle production—fed with pre-consumer food waste. The family’s original 100 acres of gravely ground exploded into a miniature city. Covering a 2,000-acre block, the back half contained gravel pits; the center housed the mile-long landfill, and the front featured a scale house, hot mix plant, and shop. The rest was farmland.
All the while, Dana’s young son, Jordan, born in 1986 and raised in the bustle, learned that 12 hours was only a half day’s work. Studying the blitz of moving parts, the boy soaked up countless lessons of entrepreneurial acumen, i.e., how to make a dollar.
Jordan was Dana’s shadow, obsessed with mechanics, equipment, farming—and fire-watch. “We got insulation that always came in hot from factories,” he recalls. “I watched for fires as my very first job, and if I saw one, the deal was I could ride to put it out. At 3, dad would let me drive the no-cab dozer with him in the middle of the night to push dirt over fires.”
Childhood and teen years were a blitz of skidsteers, tractors, corn, soybeans, hot mix, hauling, and trash routes. “We didn’t take off for holidays. It was tradition for our family to ride routes on the back of the trash truck at Thanksgiving to show the public that we cared and were personally involved.”
Reputation, Jordan learned, was everything. “My dad and grandfather were known for keeping their word. They believed that achievement could never come at the cost of community. I learned from them to be super-grateful and to give back starting with kids: 4H, FFA, Boys Club, and Girls Club.”
For the Caldwell clan, success meant relationships with county commissioners, city councils, and mayors. At business, political, and community meetings, Jordan sat shotgun, following his father’s rules to the letter. No complaining and no talking. Listen closely.
“Only after the meetings were over was I allowed to ask my dad questions,” Jordan explains. “Dad would stop me, and say, ‘That’s not the right question. Think and ask a better one.’ It was a constant process of rephrasing and learning, and that was his way of shaping me.”
“Dad demanded that I either work or play sports, because either way, he emphasized learning how to function in a team and how to be coachable,” Jordan continues. “That was him honing a killer instinct and preparing me to someday stand on my own.”
Born to It
Life seldom moves in straight lines.
In 2015, Jordan was a freshman at Marian University in Indianapolis. He returned home at Christmas break, worked every day of the interval, and drove back to Marian on a Sunday night in early January.
Crossing the threshold of his dorm room, Jordan’s cellphone buzzed.
“We got a problem,” Dana barked. “Your uncle just retired.”
Jordan’s uncle managed asphalt production as Dana’s business partner.
“Come back and take over his side. But there’s a hitch,” Dana paused. “You gotta come back tonight. Now.”
College to the right and hot mix to the left, Jordan didn’t hesitate at the fork: “I’m on my way.”
At -10 degrees at 10 p.m., Jordan walked out of his college dorm and never looked back.
The next morning, Jordan entered the Caldwell dispatcher room and received a jolt from Dana: “Put it back together.”
In temporary shock, Jordan realized Dana had left out a pertinent detail of the job description: The hot mix plant was in 1,000 pieces. Literally.
“Dad told me my uncle had torn the place apart before he left. There were parts strewn over 5 acres, but we had to get on with the show. I got a welder and a mechanic, and we worked seven days a week until the SOB was back together.”
Once up and running, Jordan learned the method of madness—and thrived. Arrive to work at 3 a.m., perform all maintenance, oversee production, and load out 2,000-3,000 tons (100-200 truckloads) per day.
“Best experience of my life,” Jordan explains. “Beat the hell outta college learning. It was hands-on run the place, communicate with trucks and plant foremen all day, and keep our customers satisfied. At the same time, it was sales all day. Sell, sell, sell, and keep the plant full. Run a crew, and keep up with liquids, fuel, and natural gas needs.”
A year later, Dana threw Jordan another fastball. “From now on, you’re gonna run the gravel pit while you’re running the hot mix plant.”
Willing to walk the high wire, Jordan attended conferences and classes to master the science behind asphalt. He ran the hot mix plant during the day and tested the asphalt at night in an on-site lab. More responsibility and extra work, but all for a reason: “That way, nobody in the chain could BS me and nobody could claim poor quality to get a free mix,” Jordan says. “It was so much work and so much learning, but I wanted it. Go, go, go.”
Born to it.
Meat on the Bone
Four years after mastering gravel and hot mix, Jordan, 22, took over specialty trucking, a role requiring nights and weekends to haul organics and liquids. Next came landfill, special waste operations, and sales. “In family business, you don’t hire from the outside,” he chuckles. “You just pile more responsibility onto family.”
In 2017, Jordan hit another dogleg: Dana sold out to Advanced Disposal. As part of the transition deal, Jordan had to stick around for two years as general manager. “At that point I just wanted to farm, but I was the sorry sunuvabitch that had to do it, and I absolutely hated it, but it turned into maybe the best thing I’ve done in my life. I worked with investment bankers and learned how to sell a business. It was like a master’s and doctorate in two years watching how corporates did big deals, for the good and bad.”
Neck-deep in the business world, Jordan smelled meat on the bone. Compost as currency.
“I wanted to compost,” Jordan explains. “Why? Because when I’d been in special waste sales, I lost repeatedly to compost and digester facilities. I lost to them even though they charged more than me. I was mesmerized. They won because they were green and a landfill-free option. I could feel big opportunity.”
After snagging a loan for 10 semis, obtaining a compost permit, and leasing a field from Dana directly beside the landfill, Jordan began hunting for customers, cold calling from a truck cab with the tenacity of a rat on a Cheeto. Going in blind, he ran short against a composting maxim: the need for massive packaged food waste volume. To tap that vein, he bet big on a trash-swilling Scott T30—a depackaging beast.
And the beast paid off in spades.
Answer the Question
Every day at Jordan’s depackaging facility, he feeds a big-box diet to the T30—essentially a giant mill. “Most of our volume comes from stores like Walmart and Sam’s. What they don’t sell gets taken out the backdoor and put in a container. That material arrives at our facility, along with products from other companies like Nestle, Ragu, and Prego.”
Jordan’s crew sorts the goods on delivery. “We de-box everything beforehand and recycle the cardboard into at least one or two bales per day. In our warehouse, we put meats in one area; drinks in one area; fruits and vegetable in another; yogurt somewhere else; and on and on. We have a special recipe and we run a balance of the products through the depackager.”
Out comes a slurry. Filtered for plastics or contaminants, the soup goes into a 5,000-gallon tanker and transported to a pit, where horse manure, corn fodder, wood chips, yard waste, and finished compost are added. Once a solid forms, the concoction is windrowed on a 4-acre pad where the strips cook at 130-160 F and get turned once weekly during a six- to eight-week span. “It’s so hot that if you put your hand in you’ll get burned,” Jordan describes. “The windrows are packed with microbial activity. Microbes going to war.”
Once cooled on the pad to kill weed seed and pathogens, the compost is placed in a curing area for 30 days and settles into a fine dust. After a final screening to ensure total removal of rocks, plastics, and wood, a nutrient-rich, 30% organic-matter elixir is ready for the rows.
Hauled on belt trailers, Jordan applies the compost to no till fields in fall and winter. “We start a field at 5-tons per acre. Then next year we step it down to 3-4 tons, and then leave it permanently at 2 tons per year. The savings are major league.”
Jordan also makes compost extract for starter, forgoing synthetics. “We put it in a stainless-steel machine and make about 500 gallons a go. Just add water, turn on the air, and aerate for 20 minutes. I completely cut out synthetic starter this year and that was $100,000 saved.”
“Between my compost and compost extracts, I’ve reduced synthetic use by 30% and boosted yield by 20%,” he adds. “Bottom line, I’m seeing major ROI, and we’re saving about $200,000 in fertilizer. The compost also packs a huge punch in organic matter and microbial activity. I’m increasing my organic matter in some fields by 1% a year, and that’s unheard of around here. Also, 2024 was the first year I had enough to sell to other farmers.”
However, present success is part of prior pain, Jordan describes. “I made big mistakes starting out. I charged in too fast and I didn’t sleep for almost two years. I had people making fun of me, but now some of them are on a waiting list to buy my products. I always believe success is out there for anyone, but not many people are willing to answer the question: ‘How hard are you willing to work for it?’”
The Recipe
As of 2025, Jordan’s vertical business movement has picked up pace. Transfer stations, roll-off companies, hammer mills, wood chips, animal bedding, hazardous waste hauling/packaging, industrial vacuum services cleaning tanks/silos at food manufacturing facilities, anerobic digester, natural gas, and carbon credits.
All said, his business umbrella covers 145 employees, and a host of vendors and customers. “I’m just a guy who makes plenty of mistakes, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes. Things always get rough in business and farming, but I count on my true supports: my faith in God, my incredibly supportive wife, and my managers and workers, many who I’ve known for over a decade. I’m surrounded by a circle of trust. That includes our community, the clients I serve, and the vendors who save me money and care about my business. In short, they are truly my friends. Maybe all of that is the recipe of success.”
That recipe is a bootstrapping formula passed from Elmer to Paul to Dana to Jordan and onward. “I have three kids. My goal is for this to continue as a legacy, no matter what direction it takes,” Jordan adds. “I’m responsible to those who came before and those who come after.”
Indeed. The Caldwell actors change, but the stage remains the same. Across generations, from farming to gravel to asphalt to landfills to trucking to compost, one business hatched another.
“My dad knew I would go in some different directions, just like he and his father before him,” Jordan concludes. “I was encouraged to grow and grow, but never at the cost of profit or integrity.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Judas Goats: Agriculture’s Bizarre, Drug-Addicted Masters of Deceit Once Ruled the Killing Floor
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian
Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas
