ENTREPRENEURS - August 2006
by Eddie Sheridan

Meet Ben Cundiff
The Cadiz lawyer, ex-banker, farmer and tobacco-buyout millionaire you probably never heard of

Ben Cundiff is a walking understatement. You’ve probably never heard of him, and he’s not the kind of guy who would care. Cundiff is a farmer, a self-described country boy who meets visitors in a T-shirt and jeans outside his tidy farm office on the edge of a cornfield near Cadiz.

You might never guess the 58-year-old Trigg County native decorates his house with South African curios and Buddhist paintings from the Himalayas, or that he once bought a bank as an excuse to come back home to his farm.

But in western Kentucky, at least, Ben Cundiff is the archetype of a mover and shaker. He owns one of the largest diversified farms in the state, roughly 12,000 acres of land. Most recently, he made headlines across Kentucky because of tobacco: Cundiff received the largest payment in the state from the 2005 federal tobacco buyout - $2.8 million for his allotment - and one of the largest in the country.

As Cundiff tells it, his story is one of a carefully planned, years-long journey away from his farm in Cadiz and back again.

Cundiff Farms was originally a 5,000-acre patch of land owned by Cundiff’s grandfather, W. C. Broadbent. The property was split between Broadbent’s three daughters when he passed away in 1962. Cundiff spent a lot of time on the farm as a child and worked there as a teenager.

Cundiff graduated high school and enrolled at Vanderbilt University to study chemical engineering. His dreams came to a halt at age 18 when his father died. About 400 acres of the farm now belonged to Cundiff, and he faced the choice of keeping it or letting it go.

He decided chemical engineering wouldn’t do him much good in Cadiz. So he finished up his degree and went on to law school, thinking attorneys had a bit more portability.

“If I was going to keep this farm, I would have to stay around here,” Cundiff said. “I went on to law school so I could try and stay somewhere around Cadiz.”

He graduated from Vanderbilt Law School in 1973 - his son, John, would later graduate from there as well in 2005 - and went on to join the Nashville law firm of Deerborn and Ewing. Dealing mostly in banking law, Cundiff’s career as a lawyer took him on business trips as far away as Saudi Arabia and Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after one of the firm’s construction clients, Rodgers International, was purchased by a group of investors from the United States and the Middle East.

For Cundiff, the Middle East was not only a different world, but was also becoming a different place to the residents who lived there.

“The country was exploding, as far as things being built,” he said. “We were working on a lot of construction projects over there. If you were 28 years old and had never been out of Cadiz, it was a pretty interesting time.”

Even as he was working his way up to become managing partner of Deerborn and Ewing, Cundiff was still thinking of ways to be closer to the family farm. He gradually had been acquiring additional land there from family members and others, and had built his own personal acreage to nearly 4,000. While his career with the Nashville firm lasted for nearly 20 years, he was still positioning himself to return to Cadiz.

Cundiff eventually left Deerborn and Ewing, which later merged with the firm of Boltz, Cummings, Conners and Berry. In 1991, a business opportunity close to home gave him the chance he wanted to get back to Cadiz. The Trigg County Farmers Bank in Cadiz came up for sale.

So Ben Cundiff bought a bank.

He was CEO and chairman of the board of the bank until it merged with the National City Bank of Evansville in 1998. Over the next three years, Cundiff gradually got out of the banking business, as National City of Evansville merged with Evansville, Ind.-based Integra Bank.

Cundiff’s exit from banking brought him full circle back to the farm. He continued to purchase pieces of land, including some from his mother and brother, until the farm grew to nearly 12,000 acres. Cundiff said he grows mostly row crops - 3,500 acres each of corn, wheat and soybeans, and 125 acres of dark tobacco. He also raises beef cattle and manages several acres of wooded area.

A windfall from tobacco
What has elevated the name Cundiff Farms above those of many other Kentucky farm operations, though, is the tremendous financial gain it saw through the 2005 federal tobacco buyout. While many farmers collected less than $1,000 through the buyout, Cundiff Farms reaped a windfall of $2.8 million, making it the highest buyout total in the state and one of the top payouts in the nation. The fact that Cundiff, his wife, Janine, and his son and daughter, Jenny, split management of the farm between them helped to increase the buyout total.

“We owned most of our land, and the allotment usually goes with the land,” he said. “So the money came directly to us.”

What Cundiff means is that many large quota holders had their allotment listed under several different names, meaning their individual payments were not as large as Cundiff’s.

These days, Cundiff and his wife travel extensively, spending about four months of the year hopping between locales on most every continent. Their house is decorated top-to-bottom with mementos from their travels. Cundiff said they even own “a little place” in the highlands of Scotland.

He shrugs off the world-traveler image, though. “We spend about half of our time trying to travel before we’re too decrepit,” he said. Cundiff has ten year-round employees on the farm, as well as season help, to keep the operation running whether he’s there or not.

The fact that the farm is family-owned has made Cundiff optimistic about keeping it in the family. He said his children spend “a good part of the year” on the farm, and the family regularly has management meetings to keep things running smoothly.

A “big picture thinker”
This unique blend of experience and perspective has made Cundiff’s presence a valuable commodity in the western Kentucky area. His most notable contributions have come in the field of education, where he has donated thousands of dollars and several hundred hours of service.

Among his many education endeavors, Cundiff donated $40,000 to purchase 30 new Apple eMac computers for Trigg County High School in August 2005. The purchase was tied to Kentucky’s Dataseam Initiative, a program designed to create a grid computing system by linking computer labs in some of the state’s K-12 schools.

Cundiff has also served as chair of the West Kentucky Academy Town Hall, a nonprofit organization based in Paducah that works as “a sort of think tank to come up with new ideas,” said Elaine Spalding, president of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce.

“Ben brings a real unique approach to the West Kentucky Academy Town Hall because he has such a unique business and regional approach to things,” Spalding said.

Dave Denton, senior partner of the Denton and Keuler law firm in Paducah, was one of the original organizers of the West Kentucky Academy Town Hall. He said when the organization was being formed, Cundiff’s name was mentioned to him by several different people. Denton said it was obvious from his first meeting with Cundiff that he would be a different kind of leader.

“Ben is a big-picture thinker,” Denton said. “Paradigms do not restrain him. He is willing to do and explore different avenues to see if we can bring progress to our area. He is one of our true west Kentucky leaders.”

In addition to all of that, Cundiff splits his time between several other boards and endeavors in Kentucky and Tennessee, including participating in a $40 million capital campaign at Vanderbilt Law School.

Not the least of Cundiff’s commitments: Keeping up with Janine’s tennis schedule. Her amateur tennis team just captured the Kentucky state title and is moving on to national competition, which took the family to Charleston, S.C. at the end of July.

Cundiff knows his is a very full plate. But in typical fashion, he dodges any kind of label as an altruist. “I guess I consider it as paying rent for taking up space on the earth,” he said.

Eddie Sheridan is a staff writer for The Lane Report. Andy Olsen contributed to this report.
editorial@lanereport.com

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