High-yield investment: how the biggest farm east of the Mississippi uses cutting-edge technology to glean a profit from this.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY - Open Grounds farm

Green into gray, earth into a hazy sky, one melts into the other. Motionless in the sultry morning, corn seems to stretch to infinity. Nothing stirs. "I loved Argentina," Antonio Cinti Luciani says, gesturing out the open window of his pickup as he looks over the fields. "If there's a place on this planet where you can practice agriculture to the edge, it's South America. There're places there you can go beyond the frontiers." This swath of coastal Carolina, hypnotic in its sheer expanse and flatness, reminds him of that.

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Luciani, 43, came to this place eight years ago. An animated Italian with agricultural degrees from universities in his homeland and Mexico, he had been happy in Argentina, but on a visit home he met Mario Visentini, who with his brother owns this corner of Carteret County. It was once so remote, local lore has it, a puckish land surveyor put up a sign: "Nowhere, N.G" Visentini offered Luciani a job as production manager of their farm.

"There." He points to a long, low building plopped in a field. "That's our fertilizer and chemical plant " In a typical year, his fertilizer bill is $2.5 million. Nearby rears a cluster of battleship-gray grain bins, linked by spidery chutes and conveyors. "That one can store 1 million bushels, and that one, 1 million. That one, we can dry 6,000 bushels an hour. That one, 2,000 bushels." Weather and commodities markets willing, more than $25 million of corn and soybeans flow through the bins in a year. A fleet that includes seven Caterpillar tracked tractors rests in the equipment lot, and inside a giant hangar, four $450,000 grain combines, among other things, await harvest season.

The pavement ends past the grain bins. But straight as a bullet flies, the dusty road continues until vanishing on the horizon. Others, perpendicular, do the same. "Every block is about a square mile, and we have 70 blocks, so if you went by that, it would be 280 miles, but a few blocks are not quite a mile so ..." Luciani stops to calculate. "I'd say we have about 250 miles of our own roads and about the same amount of canals."

This is the largest farm in the Eastern United States. Wrested from nature over the last century, its 57,000 acres cover nearly a fifth of Carteret County, sprawling over 63% of the farmland. Its site, most of the peninsula between the Neuse River and Core Sound north of Beaufort, is known to few in North Carolina. Open Grounds Farm Inc., as if hiding in plain sight, is known by even fewer, except in the realm of agriculture, where its unlikely history, advanced technology, productivity and model for the agriculture of the future are regarded with awe.

"It's absolutely amazing," says Steve Troxler, who as N.C. commissioner of agriculture presides over a state where farms average about 160 acres. Here, the romanticized notion of the small farmer confronts the reality of an urbanizing state of more than 9 million people and a planet whose population is approaching 7 billion. "We operate in a world market. We export over $3 billion of North Carolina agricultural products every year. We have everything from the largest farm this side of the Mississippi--Open Grounds--to small farms that only sell their products locally. That kind of diversity is what we have to have to feed North Carolina and the nation."

Open Grounds is a place of paradoxes, where measurements are made not just in miles and acres but also inches and ounces. Like this. Jonathan Peppers, in charge of fertilization and pesticides, hoists himself twice his height into the cab of a $120,000 sprayer and turns the ignition key. It quivers as the diesel engine fires. He codes a Falcon II agricultural computer program, then inserts a disk he's programmed. The global-positioning antenna on the roof picks up signals from a satellite 12,000 miles above, and the machine's computer system takes over. Now he or one of the other employees can distribute chemicals over as much as 1,500 acres a day, touching the steering wheel only to turn the nearly robotic machine at the edge of a field.

And like this. Giant-scale farming in 2011 uses auto-steer technology so precise that equipment veers barely more than the length of a dollar bill along a mile-long row as it plants seed, spreads fertilizer and pesticides and harvests grain...