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Debbie Meigs has the sort of prairie resume that typifies Cobalt employees. Her classroom education ended with high school. The oldest of five children of a Kansas farmer who grew corn, wheat, and alfalfa on 1,000 acres before he lost the farm, she drove a hay truck and tractor as early as age 10 and mowed and raked during haying season. "I learned to work hard early," Meigs says. She's been with the company 30 years.

Farm-toughened employees are unfazed by unforeseen problems. "Rural living is different from city living, you know," says one.

An honest day's work is only part of what Cobalt reaps from its prairie work force. Farm-toughened employees tend to work wiser, more persistently, and more frugally than run-of-the-mill employees; they are unfazed by unforeseen problems. "Rural living is different than city living, you know," says Jack Vestal, who grew up on 200 acres in Longston, Kansas, and is now an R&D associate at Cobalt. "You can't just jump up and run to town every time something happens. A farmer or rancher is pretty self-reliant. They'll have a cutting torch and a welder and learn to fix things." Paxson St. Clair uses the term "self-directed work force." He notes that Cobalt felt it necessary to hire only one or two additional supervisors among the 100 associates it added in the first quarter, even though two-thirds of the hundred were new to the company.

Farmer ingenuity flourishes at Cobalt behind a door on which an employee-made sign reads: "What-If Zone." The door leads to the engineering and R&D departments, home to 22 Cobalt associates, only three of whom have degrees beyond a high school diploma. One who does, boat designer Todd Borton, was most recently employed at a Florida mold-building company. He calls Cobalt's R&D crew the most talented group he's worked with. "Whatever I come up with," he says, "they can do."

By way of example, Borton praises brothers Roger and Rusty Jones, who grew up on a farm just west of Neodesha. "They tend to simplify things," Borton says. "I'll come up with an idea and they'll come back with some simpler ways of doing it -- and we keep going back and forth." One of Cobalt's recent designs, a sleek 34-footer marketed with the model number 343, called for a door in the curved, starboard-side dash leading down to the cabin and head. Cobalt had never fashioned any such door.

Roger Jones first tried bifold doors. On his initial attempt, the curved sections projected awkwardly into the cabin. Opening the doors the opposite way, he discovered, invited water leakage into the cabin from atop the dash. Finally, he hit upon an ingenious solution: an open-sesame pocket door that slid the thick, curved section of dash to the left on arcing tracks, making it disappear into the dash's midsection.

Niles Schurle, product manager for large boats, stands out at Cobalt because of his degree in mechanical engineering. But Schurle, too, grew up on a Kansas farm, where at age 13 he had to overhaul the engine on his father's 1949 Frazer. Otherwise, he couldn't have played freshman football: He needed the car to drive himself home from practice, which he could legally do when he turned 14.

Schurle returned to the farm in his mind not long ago to help solve a nagging boat-building concern. He was unhappy with the standard industry method for ruling out potentially dangerous cracks between the engine compartment and the cabin, cracks that could conceivably allow carbon monoxide to collect in the cabin. Shining a light in the customary fashion, he realized, would catch only a line-of-sight flaw. What if a gap involved a jog?

"We'd never had a problem, but I wasn't satisfied," he says. "I wanted a better way of testing." One day he remembered starting the old diesel tractor on the farm inside a metal shed. On cold mornings, the old warhorse would belch thick black smoke until it warmed up. That smoke, Schurle recalled, used to leak out of the shed through small gaps in the sheet metal and rise skyward. He developed a smoke-based testing system for Cobalt, surely the only boatmaker inspired to excellence by an old farm tractor.

For Paxson St. Clair, the real story here, more important even than the engineering breakthrough, was Shurle's junkyard-dog pursuit of a better testing method -- in advance of any problem. "How often," asks St. Clair, "do company owners lament, 'If only I could get my people to think like me, think like an owner.' Or, 'If only I could clone myself, then the job would get done right.'

"Farmers are owners of their own businesses," he says. "They understand that things have to get done and get done right or you'll pay for it later. They have this sense of ownership because they've been there."

Not every company has the good sense to leverage the uncommon skills of a work force. Keith Launchbury, a consultant on manufacturing systems to scores of Fortune 500 companies, has spent three or four days a month at the Neodesha plant in the past two years. He's also consulted at companies that function much differently.

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