Flashback Friday October 9, 2008

Corn harvest is ‘popping’ for local farmers

Brian Hornback

by DENNIS BEARD

J-E News Editor

On Thursday, as they finished up harvesting their exclusive crop of popcorn across 1,500 acres of ground in Webster and Hopkins counties, local farmers Kerry Winstead and Brian Hornback said they were pleased with the overall quality.

“Yields have been good this time,” Winstead said as he sat waiting for the arrival of a semi truck to pick up a load of harvested corn on a farm near Manitou belonging to Debbie Withers. “There was some wind damage, but overall it’s been good.”

Winstead and Hornback are partners in one of the very few popcorn farming operations in not only this region, but the country as well. Winstead said the manufactuers who buy the popcorn for distribution to concession stands and movie theaters generally prefer to deal with fewer farmers that can produce a greater amount, partly because of the cost to transport it. Winstead estimated a total of approximately 100 semi trucks would carry full loads of the popcorn — approximately 70 acres per day at 10 truckloads per day — from their farms to the processing plant in Louisville before being distributed to buyers.

“Quite a bit of popcorn is grown in Nebraska,” he said. “It goes to the west coast. Japan buys a lot from this one company that I grow for.”

He added that Mexico, Spain, and other foreign countries where popcorn production is “scarce” also buy the product.

In the spring, Winstead and Hornback told The J-E they decided to only grow popcorn instead of splitting the farmland between field corn and popcorn. Although it’s something they have tried before several years ago, it wasn’t an easy decision, and Winstead repeated that point on Thursday.

“It’s kind of a risky crop right to the end,” he said. “We’re on kind of a schedule. You don’t want it to get too dry, and its been so windy lately, the moisture is really getting low on it.”

Kerry Winstead

He explained that part of the issue is that if the crop doesn’t meet requirements, it is usually rejected, whereas fieldcorn might be subsidized based on the condition. He said it’s more difficult to recoup the loss on a bad crop of popcorn than it is on field corn.

“Machines have to be more fine-tuned; no foreign substances,” he said. “No beans, no dirt. We have to watch for insects and mold more. If we take this (crop), and there’s a problem, they’ll just reject it.”

Winstead said he considers himself lucky when it comes to raising the crop, something he’s been growing for almost 25 years.

“We’ve only had one load rejected ever,” he said. “We sold it and it went to a feed lot. We’ve been very fortunate.”

The entire harvesting process of the popcorn took Winstead and Hornback about two weeks to complete, and might have been finished faster except they moved one of the combines to begin harvesting soybean last Saturday.

That’s what Hornback was doing on Thursday in a field several miles away from where Winstead was working, and he seemed optimistic about the condition of the early-maturing beans as well.

“We’ve got 2,000 acres of beans,” Hornback said. “The early maturing beans are as good as we have had in several years.

“The late-maturing beans might not be so good, though.”

Over the four-to-five day period of bean harvesting, Hornback said they had threshed about 350 to 400 acres.

Both men said they were confident about the turn-out of this year’s pocorn crop as well, and Winstead called it an “above average yield.”