WAKARUSA, Ind. — The view from David Eby’s office window is magnificent. It offers a sweeping vista of the Indiana countryside – at 160 miles per hour, and 30 feet off the ground.

But Eby doesn’t have even a moment to enjoy it. Inside the cockpit of his bright yellow and blue-trimmed 1991 Air Tractor 402 crop duster, he’s much too busy to take in the view. Eby, owner and president of AgriFlite Services, Inc. of Wakarusa in rural Elkhart County, in northern Indiana, has been spraying fields across the Midwest for 37 years.

“I always wanted to fly,” said the 62-year-old Eby. “I never imagined this, though. I wanted to be an airline pilot.”

By the time he got a chance to fly an airliner, the energy crisis of the early 1970s hit and airlines were laying off pilots. The price of gas shot up from a few cents a gallon to more than 50 cents – a huge increase at that time. Eby said he knew his opportunity to become an airline pilot was gone.

So, with a degree in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering, he came back home to Elkhart County and went to work as an engineer in the recreational vehicle industry. That lasted for a couple of years; then, the RV industry tanked. So in 1973, Eby scraped together $21,000 for a Cessna and went into the crop dusting business. Today, that business has four planes – three based in Wakarusa and one in DeKalb, Ill.

Crop dusting has been around since 1921 (the first reported crop duster was in Troy, Ohio). In the early days, itinerant pilots went farm to farm offering to spray fields for whatever the farmer was willing to pay. Today, it’s a much more sophisticated business. Eby has clients all over the Midwest, from small blueberry farms in LaPorte County, Ind., to huge cornfields in Illinois owned by corporate giants like Monsanto.

In Indiana, there are some 30 crop dusting operations with 118 certified crop dusters, according to Dave Scott, pesticide administrator with the Indiana State Chemist’s office at Purdue University, which is responsible for licensing all crop dusters in the state. Those pilots spray some 1.2 million acres, doing everything from putting down fungicides and pesticides to applying fertilizer and seed.

“Over the last few years, there has been a huge surge in crop dusting in Indiana,” said Scott. While the amount of crop dusting done in Indiana doesn’t yet come close to what is done in California, Arizona, Florida and the Southern Cotton Belt, it is growing in the Midwest.

“Three years ago a product was introduced that detasseled corn,” said Scott. That product (the most widely used is sold under the brand name Headline) is an effective tool for farmers, provided it is applied at the right time of the season and when the plants are at the right developmental stage.

“And corn prices have to be right,” said Scott, describing the situation as “a perfect storm.”

That perfect storm has been in place the last few years, and crop dusting in Indiana and elsewhere in the Midwest has taken off. The demand is so great that out-of-state pilots are being contracted by Indiana firms to help.

Eby has come to rely on out-of-state pilots because he has been busy “from dawn to dusk.” Eby, whose family business includes sons Garrett and Ryan (both are pilots) and his wife, Denise, who oversees the office, and three other employees, said the bulk of his customers are within 150 miles of Wakarusa. Even so, he recently was spraying fields in South Dakota and in the past has traveled as far west as Arizona and California.

“I enjoy flying. I’ve been doing it 38 years,” said Eby. “I like the freedom of having my own business. What you have and do is up to you.”

But while Eby enjoys the freedom of having his own business, he also has to deal with some of the toughest of state and federal regulations. Besides his pilot’s license, he has to be licensed in each of the chemicals he applies, he has to be licensed in each of the states in which he operates (Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Arizona and California) and he has to be aware of any new security rules announced by the Federal Aviation Administration.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Eby and other crop dusters around the country were grounded for days before they could get back to work. Most recently, when President Obama visited Elkhart, the entire county became a no-fly zone and Eby was grounded again, losing a day of business.

“What I like least is the overbearing government,” said Eby. “The bureaucracy is getting out of hand.” But despite the bureaucracy and the long hours, he loves to fly.

When he borrowed money to get his first airplane, it was because of that love of flying. He became a crop duster because he needed to feed his family. It was a marriage of doing the thing he loved to do and figuring out a way to put food on his table at the same time.

“I wanted to enjoy airplanes and making a living at it,” said Eby. “It turned out to be a winner.”

The long hours – from sunup to sundown this time of year – can become tiring, but Eby added, with a smile, “The winters are great.” Last winter, he and his wife spent time in Sedona, Ariz.

Times, though, have changed. Planes are a lot more expensive and technology makes crop dusting a lot more accurate – and safer – than it was just a generation ago. The most recent plane Eby acquired cost nearly $1 million. “It doesn’t look like it would,” he said, adding that the cost doesn’t include the specialized spraying equipment and $50,000 worth of avionics.

It costs Eby $2,200 an hour to operate that plane, which is where he starts when it comes to billing clients. “It’s not too bad, though. It works out to about the same as spraying a field on the ground, only we can get it done a lot quicker,” said Eby, adding it can take just 15 minutes to spray a field.

(Refer to the newspaper for the remaining portion.)