(MONEY Magazine) – Driving at an easy clip along a gravel road that stretches on and on into the horizon, Rich Kay makes a sudden right-hand turn and steers his Chevrolet truck up a steep and bumpy incline. "Here we are," he says a few moments later, parking on a grassy hilltop that affords a broad view of his fields--hundreds of acres of gold corn and green soybeans ready for the autumn harvest. Only the traffic on U.S. Interstate 80, just a few hundred yards away, cuts through the midday calm.

It's this same highway that has come to divide Rich Kay's life over the past year. Minutes from where we're parked is the Atlantic, Iowa farmhouse where he and Kathy, his wife, have raised their three children. But 70 miles down the road, just outside Des Moines, is Rich's new job. His new desk job. Monday through Friday at 6:15 a.m., he gets in his Honda and heads east on the Interstate. His employer, Datatron Ltd., leases software and sells computer hardware to auto-parts stores and wholesalers. Rich gets to the office by 7:30, logs on to his PC and jumps into the business of the day, consulting with clients on their computer needs. At 5 p.m. he logs off, bids good-bye to his colleagues and begins the 70-mile commute home.

This is all a strange new ritual. For three decades, Kay rarely left his hometown on a weekday. He had no reason to. During his career he'd built up a profitable hog business and a thriving farm on nearly 800 acres. In recent years, though, Rich, an Iowa State University graduate, began to wonder if he'd be better off in another profession. Just maybe, he began to think, he should leave farming for technology. A month before the turn of the millennium, he put the finishing touches on his resume. "I'm not sure where this is leading," he told me then. "I'm 53. I'm looking for my first job."

A year later, it seems clear that the poles in Rich Kay's life are planted in the Old Economy on the one hand and the New Economy on the other. But what does it mean to jump from one America to another these days--especially at an age when most people are bracing for the homestretch toward retirement? We've heard that America has never created more jobs, or retrained more workers, than over the past few years. Up close, though, the path into the information age looks more complicated. Rich Kay wasn't forced to take that route, yet as he saw things around him changing, he decided he wanted to change as well. And then he began to realize something he hadn't considered before--that failure was a distinct possibility.

"FARMING WAS PART OF THE GOOD LIFE"

Iowa is large enough to contain about 33 million acres of cropland and 96,000 farms. It's still small enough, however, for a single farm family to gain a reputation that carries far beyond its local district. The Kays of Cass County fit that description. Rich's family have been farming the land near Atlantic--the county seat--since the 1890s. Through all the ups and downs in the farm economy, this has always been home. Driving around town, Rich and Kathy--who also grew up on a farm nearby--point proudly to landmarks that have been part of their lives from the very beginning: the church, the high school, the old Whitney Hotel, where we stop for a lunch of fried chicken fritters. The town center, on a wide main street that runs past the five-and-dime and ends at a defunct red-brick Rock Island Line train depot, seems exquisitely preserved from some vanished, premodern era. Atlantic hasn't been hit as hard as some other Iowa towns, says Kathy, but it hasn't flourished either. "I think we'd be lucky if we still have 7,000 people living here," she says--about the same population as when she was growing up.

Rich returned to Atlantic in 1970, after graduating from Iowa State and a year-long stint in Vietnam. Kathy was waiting for him there--they'd been married in 1967 and were intent on starting a family and a farm. "There wasn't any question in my mind that that's what I wanted to do," Rich recalls. "It's probably like a lot of other occupations in that it really gets in your blood. My parents had been very successful--my grandparents and all of my aunts and uncles had all been very successful. To me, farming was part of what you might call the good life. There were lots of opportunities, and it just seemed to depend on how hard you worked and how smart you worked at it."

He and Kathy recount their early years together at the kitchen table of their farmhouse, a few miles from downtown Atlantic. The corn rows come to the very edge of the backyard here, and on clear days like this Kathy likes to watch from the kitchen window as the sun goes down over the fields. She and Rich built the house in 1974; their old clapboard home nearby had become too confining for their growing family. At the time, Rich's business was also getting larger--thanks to some land gifts from his parents and his own real estate purchases, he had expanded his crop holdings to about 600 acres. He'd made an effort to diversify, not only as a hedge against falling grain prices but also to add value during years of average revenue. He built a "finishing" facility for hogs on one of his parcels and, in partnership with six other farmers, invested in a sow cooperative that could produce 10,000 baby pigs a year. Things were clicking. By the end of the '70s, Rich was earning between $35,000 and $45,000.

The next few years were devastating. At 32, Kathy was diagnosed with lupus; she soon came to realize that working on top of raising the kids could jeopardize her health. Then came the farm crisis: the bankruptcies of friends and neighbors, the early-morning equipment auctions, the newspaper stories of farmers' suicides. "The '80s showed you couldn't be just a hard worker and make it in farming," says Kathy. "Because we had friends who were hard workers and they didn't make it. You had to have the management skills. You had to be a smart businessman." Adds Rich: "Part of that was you could not have a big debt load. Because when interest rates went through the roof, the people who were highly leveraged were forced out. We were fortunate enough to be able to survive it."

So his commitment never wavered during that time? He laughs a little and says that yes, yes it did begin to waver. "I really had some second thoughts about what I was doing and the fact that I'd bought [land] when I shouldn't have," he recalls. "We really struggled. We didn't make any money for a number of years, and we had more debt than we should have." He pauses for a moment to reflect. He drums his hand on the table. "Like a lot of people who were trying to grow," he says at last, "I had dug a hole and I had to get out."

ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES

Things got better during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Prices rebounded, and Rich took advantage of the drop in interest rates to refinance his debt. His income bounced back too, hitting $70,000 and $80,000 during good years. But as the decade wore on, profit margins on crops grew thinner and most Iowa farmers' reliance on government farm aid grew larger. Rich tells me he had long envisioned getting out of the grueling daily demands of keeping livestock at 55 and continuing to farm the corn and soybean fields until retirement age. "We could have farmed 600 or 800 acres and probably kept ahead of the game as far as paying bills," he says. "But I reached a point where I had done it enough years that I needed a new challenge."

Kathy interjects--she tosses the phrase burned out on the table like a hot platter. Rich nods but doesn't repeat the words. "I think the 1980s were hanging around in my mind in terms of not wanting to go through something like that again," he says instead. "I think if I had my life to live over, I probably would have made some changes then."

By the time the value of Rich's sow cooperative plummeted by more than half in 1998, the choice was getting clearer. He could weather a year without income, but some of his partners in the co-op were ruined by the turn of events. "These were people who had their dream jerked out from under them," Rich says slowly. "They had got to the point where they could not sleep at night. And that's when you know that you have to make a change."

"Did you ever have that problem?" Kathy says playfully to Rich, and their eyes lock as he smiles back faintly.

"Yeah. Yeah, I did," he says after a moment. "I think everyone goes through that to some degree. But I think because of the nature of farming, you have some anxieties. You worry about not just the weather but also the markets or maybe a decision you've made."

"Things you can't control," says Kathy.

"Some things you can't control and other things that seem beyond control," says Rich. "But it's not a case of 'poor me,' or 'poor anyone' out here. You make choices in life, and I have no regrets about growing up on a farm, living on a farm, working on a farm, being involved in what we've done and raising a family here. It's been very good to us.

"There are just some economic aspects that have changed," he adds. "And sometimes you have to roll with the punches and move on."

A CLEAN BREAK WITH AGRICULTURE

Not long after he planted his crop in the spring of 1999, Rich drove the hundred miles or so to Iowa State University in Ames to visit Keith Heffernan, a close friend from college who works as the assistant director of the university's Center for Agriculture and Rural Development. It's not uncommon for Heffernan to hear from farmers who are ready to hang it up. The one person he never expected to help was Rich Kay. "I was shocked," Heffernan told me when I visited him in Ames. "You just don't expect someone who's been that successful, and with that kind of family tradition in agriculture, to come in and say 'Hey, I'm going to try something different.'"

The researchers at Iowa State spend a lot of time looking at the economics of farms like Rich's. As they quickly point out, farmers' good times and Wall Street's good times don't necessarily coincide. Much of this country's dwindling rural middle class has watched the bull market on television as their far-flung communities have thinned--and then thinned some more. In the more remote counties of Iowa, where the back roads are lined with abandoned farmhouses, there is ramshackle evidence of that shift everywhere you look.

Paul Lasley, a rural sociologist at Iowa State who keeps an eye on these changes, conducts an annual poll that gauges the opinions and outlook of Iowa farmers. Lasley is a forceful presence--a gregarious, barrel-shaped man with an infectious laugh and a piercing tenor voice. In his 2000 poll, he tells me, the level of optimism among farmers surveyed struck record lows. This is grim stuff. Lasley thinks that to earn a decent living farmers need to adapt, either by taking a second job or by adding livestock, organic growing or the like to their feed corn and soybean crops. Even then, he concedes, the big money may elude them. "For the last several years," he explains, "people who had assets in agriculture--if they were simply driven by economic rationale--would have sold their farms, taken the money and put it in the bank or the stock market. But they didn't, because they'd made a long-term commitment to farming. Yes, they say, I could make more money doing X, Y or Z, but I want to do this."

Now that long-term commitment is breaking down. And to some of the economists at Iowa State, revenue statistics can't explain it. The financial pressures on Iowa farmers, they insist, are nothing like they were in the '80s. Bruce Babcock, the director of the school's Center for Agriculture and Rural Development, wonders whether several factors coalesce into this sense of resignation: "Why am I doing this? Why am I a farmer? Why am I devoting my life to producing corn and soybeans, which we have a surplus of?" Babcock then ticks off some other reasons--Iowa's 2% unemployment rate and "the other economy" outside of farming where so many are making so much more. Finally, he adds, "I don't think it's any fun anymore. And with the rural communities shrinking, I'm not sure it's even such a good place to raise a family."

Not all farmers are leaving, of course. Rich's older brother Kenneth, for instance, a full-time farmer in Atlantic who also works as a seed company sales rep, has no intention of making a change. Iowa State's Farm On program, which matches prospective young farmers with older producers who want to sell their assets and crop fields, gets 10 eager applicants for every farm. (Do they know what they're in for? Perhaps not.)

What is certain, in any case, is that farmers enter--and leave--the profession for different reasons. Rich wasn't only stressed by work and dubious about future business prospects; he had also come to a deeply private impasse, a feeling that told him he had to move on. Keith Heffernan assumed that Rich would want to change over to an agriculture-related job, perhaps on the sales side of a seed or herbicide company--a common enough transition for a smart, progressive farmer--so he set Rich up with an Iowa State placement director to talk about ag jobs. But Rich had begun thinking about other prospects. In mid-July he had signed up for a one-week seminar about the Web. As he recalls it, that course brought home to him how much he still had to learn about computers. When the teacher suggested that Rich could learn more--and even get work in network support--by pursuing Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer credentials, he got curious. He looked into the class; then he talked it over with Kathy. It was 11 months long and no bargain at $9,000. Moreover, it was taught in Des Moines on Friday evenings and all day Saturday, which meant he'd need to work the farm all week and stay at his daughter's place outside Des Moines on Friday nights. Still, it seemed right to him. It felt right. He sensed that if he wanted to make a clean break with agriculture, this seemed as good a place as any to start.

CONFRONTING THE ENTRY LEVEL

The Microsoft course had some rocky stretches. During Rich's 30 years of farm work, keeping abreast of new technology generally involved reading up on hybrid seeds, the latest fertilizers or innovations in farm machinery. This was different. "There was the realization," says Rich, "that if I was going to be involved with computer technology, then I had a long way to go. I didn't have enough experience and exposure to the software. I had not torn a computer apart and put it back together." In addition, there were no ex-farmers in the class--and no one over 40. "I was the old guy," says Rich, smiling. "My best friend coming out of the class was a senior at Iowa State. I stuck with him because he could help me through some spots."

The Microsoft class began in late August 1999. By fall Rich began to realize that if this was to be his final harvest, he would need to find a job before spring. "Entry level was what I had to face," he says, "but I didn't want to work for $8 an hour." He started going to job fairs and handing out his resume. And he began to see that Des Moines' biggest employers weren't interested in him. He didn't have hands-on computer experience--and his age was working against him.

At one point, he interviewed with a national copier company. A sales territory was opening up, and he wondered if this was an open door he should walk through--take a job in sales, in other words, and then attempt to switch over to the company's tech division. It was the new year by then; if Rich didn't find something soon, he knew he'd need to start the farm again. "I won't say I was desperate," he says, "but by February I was getting discouraged."

Rich was days away from deciding to take the copier-company job. But just then he got a call from an old friend from Atlantic named Sue Stonehocker, who runs a small software company with her brother, Scott Buechler, in Waukee, a suburb west of Des Moines. Sue and Rich had spoken a month or two earlier about Rich's job search; at the time, Sue offered Rich a few suggestions. Now she wanted to interview him for something that had opened up at her company, Datatron--a position that involved working closely with Scott on the technology and sales side of the business. The job would mean a pay cut from what Rich was used to. And he would have to learn the software pretty quickly. Still, Sue and Scott would very much like to have him. Was he interested?

Sure he was. "Scott and Sue knew us," says Rich, "they knew the family and they knew we were honest, hardworking people. They were willing to take a chance." He made the decision to quit the Microsoft course, knowing that he would be too busy to juggle it with a new job. As for his farm, his 30-year-old son Phil surprised him by choosing to leave his job with a fertilizer company to do the planting and harvesting for 2000, as long as his dad would oversee the marketing decisions. Rich and his partners had put the sow co-op on the market, and he had rented out his finishing facility for hogs. Suddenly, things were falling into place. For the first time in his adult life, he was free from the day-to-day farm work and about to get a regular paycheck. The first day of his first job was Feb. 21.

I drove out to visit Rich in his office at Datatron in September. Waukee is at the very edge of the Des Moines metro area, and it bears a resemblance in some respects to Rich's own state of affairs. It too is in transition--a town where the farm fields that remain all carry FOR SALE OR LEASE signs, and where sections that have already been sold now boast freshly minted American-dream houses in dense, subdivided clusters. Clearly, the city is spreading out, rolling over the old Midwest. Rich's company is located in a low-slung brick building across from a sod field. Though Datatron has been around for about two decades, it has the relaxed atmosphere of a tech start-up; the employees wear shorts and sneakers, and the workrooms are strewn with circuit boards and disemboweled servers. Rich's own neatly kept office could be at Anycompany, U.S.A. It houses a desktop computer with two monitors, a cluttered corkboard on one wall and a NASCAR calendar on another. Apart from a family photo, there is no evidence of another life.

Getting up to speed at Datatron has been a challenge, Rich tells me. Mastering the company's inventory software was tough, and he was staggered--he is still staggered--by information overload. Nevertheless, he says he's making the adjustment. He works part of the time on payroll and sales matters, and part of the time on software support. Much of his sales work entails figuring out what kind of hardware configurations suit clients' business requirements.

"Here, let me show you," he says, clicking his mouse a few times and bringing up an Excel spreadsheet. All the while he is talking about databases and Unix systems and proprietary software and...and I am utterly confused by the numbers and codes he's scrolling through on-screen. In a sense, though, that's beside the point. What hits me is that he's full of zeal, and that it isn't every day that you meet someone who has suddenly discovered, fairly late in life and perhaps not a moment too soon, that his work can be new and exciting.

SOMETHING WON FOR SOMETHING LEFT BEHIND

"Have you ever seen the leaves change in New England?" Kathy is asking me this as we bump along one of Atlantic's back roads in the pickup truck. "That's what I'd really like to do sometime," she says. "Watch the colors. For 25 years we haven't been able to leave here. Every fall, we had the harvest."

Rich drives on silently. For him, the change in their lives has been liberating too, but in a different way. "For all these years I've been tied to the work here," he'd told me earlier. "And the transition of moving from one career to another came down to this: I wanted to do something different. I wanted to experience something different." After a moment of explanation, he'd added: "I needed to be around other people." It struck me then--for the first time, really--that farming had not just been a career of hard physical demands and unpredictable rewards. At some point, it had become lonely as well.

Still, it is not completely true that Rich and Kathy are free of the farm or even that they want to be. They carry an immense feeling of gratitude for the life that it's given them; what's more, they own the land and will continue to do so. What they need to figure out now is how to manage it. This winter, Phil will decide whether he wants to continue to work the fields on salary from his father. It isn't a full-time wage, but Phil's wife is a veterinarian, and their finances (and her benefits) might allow for it. When I asked him if he was surprised to find himself farming, he echoed his father almost precisely: "It's just in my blood. It's something I've grown up around. Maybe after this harvest I'll have gotten it out of my blood; maybe not. We'll have to see." If Phil decides against carrying on here, Rich will consider selling his combine and tractors and renting out the land. In a good year, that could amount to about $25,000.

Land in Iowa doesn't get bought and sold for quick profit. For most farmers out here, the land itself is their nest egg, a kind of tangible 401(k) that ensures them a dependable rental return for their later years. That's why Rich is in a fortunate position: He has his acreage, along with a good chunk of money he and Kathy put into their retirement accounts during the 1990s. A stock fund they bought in 1975 with a small inheritance has also done well. While they're not overly anxious about their future finances, retirement is something they think about often, and the crux of their biggest decision--whether to sell the house where they raised their children--may turn on it.

That too will be determined this winter. Rich's commute is wearing on him. Getting accustomed to his new job is hard enough; Route 80 at night is almost too much to bear. When he returns home, he says, he needs to close his eyes for a few minutes to recover, and a move to West Des Moines is looking better and better. He and Kathy have friends in the city, and they agree that they would have more to do there. Still, the idea of selling is clearly much harder for her than it is for him--this house, Rich acknowledges, "is Kathy's pride and joy."

Could they afford to keep a place in the city and the home in the country? "That depends on who you ask," says Kathy.

Rich replies that it would make saving for retirement too difficult. "I don't want to work forever," he says. "And so if we look at buying a townhouse and keep this house, that just means I'm going to have to work for a longer period of time."

Once again, it comes down to weighing the options. I'd been under the presumption that this transition for the Kays--this change from rural work to city work, from the Old Economy to the New--would stack up in the profits column of their ledger, a win-win move. But, of course, that's impossible. I can see that looking out the window at the cornstalks moving in the breeze and in the serene waning of a country afternoon. It all has to balance out: something won for something left behind.

Late in the day, Rich and I take a stroll. "I don't get much exercise anymore," he says, patting his stomach. "I'm getting out of shape. I walk the yard any chance I get." He goes over to where the grass ends and the crop fields begin, takes an ear of corn off the stalk, shucks it and gives it to me. "You can take this back to New York City," he says, clearly amused by the idea. It's feed corn, of course, useless to me except as something to hang on my apartment door in honor of autumn. But I take it anyway; this is the real thing, and for reasons I can't explain, I'd like to bring it home.

We walk back inside to the kitchen to where Kathy is standing. She has a bag of homemade cookies--a present for the plane ride. "So you can see what it's like out there," she says, smiling. "You can see how hard it's going to be to leave." I nod in agreement--actually all three of us nod in agreement--and again we look out the back windows at the fields.