Keep Your Tire in the Furrow: How a Farm Kid Became a Century-Old Bank's Change Agent

There is an old lesson that farm kids learn before they ever read a business book. When you're pulling a plow through a field, the only way to cut a straight line is to keep your front tire in the furrow someone else already cut. Drift away from it, and the whole row goes crooked. Stay in it, and you rarely go wrong.

D. Joe Caffee has been staying in the furrow his entire life.

Today, Caffee serves as President and CEO of First State Bank of Middlebury, a northern Indiana community bank approaching $900 million in assets. But the story of how he got there, from a sharecropper's barn south of Fort Wayne to a public company boardroom, is the kind of story that reminds you that where you start doesn't limit where God can take you. It shapes it.

The Education That Started With a Bull Calf Named Freddy

Caffee grew up in Berne, Indiana, the oldest of three boys raised on a diversified farm. His father worked a full-time job in town and then came home to farm other people's land in exchange for a share of the harvest, a genuine sharecropper arrangement that had nearly vanished by his generation. The family had corn in abundance but rarely much cash.

When Joe was eight years old, his father loaded him into the family's Dodge pickup, drove to a local dairy farm, and let him pick out a bull calf. The deal was simple: Dad supplied the corn to feed the steer. Joe supplied the labor. After eighteen months, the steer, affectionately named Freddy, went to market, and the family kept a quarter of the beef. Joe sold the rest to neighbors and family members and pocketed the proceeds.

It was his first lesson in leverage. Not financial leverage in the technical sense, but the deeper kind: understanding how to convert what you have into what you need.

"Dad had a lot of corn. He always paid us boys in corn to feed our cattle. That eight-year-old Joe who got a bull calf ended up paying for my entire college education with money from my small cattle enterprise."

Caffee and his wife Cheryl have carried that model forward. All three of their children have raised and sold 4-H animals. Their oldest daughter Grace just graduated from college debt-free and Jessa is on her way to do the same.

Beyond the economics, the farm built something harder to quantify. Coming home from school at twelve or thirteen years old, Caffee would ride out to the field to relieve his grandfather on the tractor, then plow or bale hay until dark. It was an early apprenticeship in endurance, variability, and the kind of work that doesn't stop because you're tired.

"Those lessons about being connected to the land," he says, "I think that's really important. You learn work ethic. You learn the value of a dollar. Farm kids have a big advantage in a lot of ways."

Finding His Own Faith

The other formative thread running through Caffee's upbringing was his family's faith. He grew up in a deeply conservative denomination: structured, reverent, and traditional in ways that are increasingly rare. Sunday mornings meant arriving early enough to beat the other congregants, sitting on gender-separated sides of the sanctuary, and attending two services with a full church fellowship lunch between them. Women wore head coverings. Men prayed in formal, communal patterns.

"I always tell people I grew up just left of the Amish," he says with a laugh.

But inherited faith, however sincere, is not the same as owned faith. Caffee was eighteen and driving alone when it crystallized for him that his parents' faith needed to become his own. He gave his life to Christ, alone in his car, and the decision began reshaping everything.

He turned down a fraternity invitation at Purdue; he'd already committed to Christ, and a party themed around drinking wasn't where he was headed. Instead, he found Fairway House, a Christian men's cooperative on campus, and lived there with fifty other men who took their faith seriously. It was there, in a Bible study one evening, that a leader asked him to pray aloud for the group's prayer requests. Caffee prayed the way he'd been raised: short, structured, reverent, and then sat in the silence afterward as the leader slowly, specifically, personally prayed for each need that had been shared.

"That was a great moment for me," Caffee recalls, "to learn how other people were raised and how other Christian walks did things."

And in a full-circle moment that only God seems to architect, both of his daughters chose to live in the sister cooperative house at Purdue, and love it.

The Long Road Into Banking

Caffee graduated from Purdue with a degree in agricultural education and spent three years teaching junior high and high school agriculture. He was coaching football, running the FFA program, and working every extra hour he could find for a young man who'd just gotten married. He was also helping his dad farm on the side.

When his first child Grace was on the way, Caffee felt the pull to be home more. Around that time, First Bank of Berne, one of the largest agricultural lenders east of the Mississippi River, called looking for a credit analyst who understood farming. He took the job.

Ninety days in, the bank president knocked on his cubicle wall. A loan officer had just quit. Caffee was promoted on the spot.

"Don't screw up" — that was essentially my inspiring training to become a lender."

He spent the next twelve and a half years rising through that organization, eventually becoming the senior lender overseeing the entire portfolio. When the succession plan played out and a new president only eight years older than Caffee was named to the role, he saw the ceiling clearly. He found an ad for a northern Indiana bank seeking a new president and CEO, threw his name in, and nine months later moved his family to Middlebury.

That was twelve years ago.

Leading Change in a Century-Old Institution

Before he accepted the role, Caffee spent a full Saturday locked in the boardroom after closing, pouring through files for six to eight hours, treating the process like he was buying the company. What he found both excited and sobered him.

The average employee tenure was long. People came to First State Bank and built their careers there. That loyalty was a genuine asset. It was also, potentially, a significant obstacle.

"One of the things that really excited me was that people came and worked here for their careers," he says. "One of the things that scared me was the exact same thing."

He was thirty-nine years old. The average age of the bank's employees was fifty-six. He had less years of experience than many of the people he was being asked to lead. He asked the board directly before accepting: do you want to maintain the status quo, or do you want to grow? They said they wanted change.

What followed was one of the harder seasons in his professional life. In his first year, roughly thirty-five percent of the staff turned over. A voluntary early retirement program followed, offered to eleven qualifying employees. Eight accepted. All eight, Caffee notes with evident pride, still stop to hug him in the lobby.

"I knew it was a very fair and honorable offer that we made."

The results speak clearly. When Caffee arrived, the bank had roughly $400 million in assets and 130 employees. Today it's approaching $900 million in assets with 120 employees. They serve more customers with fewer people, because they've invested heavily in technology. The bank now has its own private-cloud AI environment, and its team logged more than 1,000 AI-assisted queries in a single week last month.

"We're at the front end of embracing AI for community banks," Caffee says. "One of the things you can do is nothing. There are businesses that will survive not using it. We're not one of them."

The demographic reversal inside the bank mirrors his own career arc. When he arrived at thirty-nine, the average employee was fifty-six. Now Caffee is closer to fifty-six, and the average employee is closer to thirty-nine. "I've got the grey hair now," he says, smiling.

The Good Wine

No honest telling of Joe Caffee's story avoids the hardest chapter. Six years ago, his wife Cheryl was diagnosed with stage 3 metastatic melanoma. In the years since, the family has made forty-one trips to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. They have ridden the full arc, from the relief of clear scans to the grief of recurrence, from hopeful treatments to a rapid response team being called to revive Cheryl in a hospital room.

Six weeks before this conversation, the cancer returned for the fourth time. Joe and Cheryl chose to hold the news quietly until after two family milestones they had prayed to reach, their youngest son Trey's high school graduation, and their oldest daughter's wedding. Two days after the wedding, they drove back to Mayo for surgery.

Through it all, Caffee was asked by Grace and her new husband Jacob to perform their wedding ceremony. He spent weeks in scripture preparing. He kept returning to the account in John's Gospel of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana, and more specifically to the host's surprised remark that the best wine had been saved for last.

"The average wine is our jobs, our possessions, our stuff — the things we work so hard to have or do or experience. Those are good things. But the really good wine — the best wine — is saved for later. It's saved for those moments with Christ. When everything else strips away, I don't know what you do if you don't have the good wine."

He pauses. "The average stuff doesn't matter as much anymore at our house."

It is a profoundly practical theology, not the kind polished for a stage, but the kind hammered out in hospital waiting rooms and late-night drives to Minnesota. Faith, for Caffee, has never been a separate category from his professional life or his family life. It is the furrow everything else follows.

His Greatest Success

When asked what he's most proud of, Caffee doesn't hesitate. It isn't the bank's growth trajectory. It isn't the technology transformation. It isn't the early retirement program he navigated with grace or the shareholders he's learned to serve.

"My three kids," he says simply. "Just the fact that our kids are still a close family unit. I watch others where that's not always the case as kids grow up. We raised three nice children who appear to want to be productive members of society. And all have a faith that they're making their own."

That last phrase carries weight. Caffee knows firsthand, from his own moment alone in a car at eighteen, that faith cannot be transferred by proximity or tradition. It has to be chosen. His job, as he sees it, was to cut a straight furrow and trust his children to follow it into their own encounter with God.

"My grandparents and parents left a long legacy of faith. Then it's our job, Cheryl's and my job, to have that furrow created for our kids to stay in. Hopefully we've done that."

The plowing metaphor keeps returning to him because it is not just a pleasant nostalgia. It is a working philosophy. First State Bank was already a century old and well-respected when Caffee arrived. His job wasn't to reinvent it, it was to keep his tire in the furrow the institution had already cut, while steering toward the fields ahead.

For the farm kid from Berne who funded his own education one steer at a time, that's not a limitation. It's a gift.

Is there a furrow in front of you right now — a legacy of faithfulness, a proven path, or a community of committed people — that you've been drifting away from? This week, consider where you need to steer back in.