Drive across Ohio in the summertime and you’ll see fields upon fields of corn.
Much of it will be used to produce ethanol or livestock feed, but a small fraction of those golden kernels will end up coated in butter at movie theaters or covered in caramel at carnivals.
The United States is the world’s largest producer of popcorn. And Ohio — along with states like Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri — is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
“Ohio has always been a big player in popcorn production,” said Brian Churchill. He’s been a popcorn farmer since the late ‘70s and has worked with the Popcorn Board to study safe and productive ways to grow it.
Of 230,000 acres of popcorn planted nationwide last year, he estimates just under 10% came from the Buckeye state.
What does it take to grow popcorn?
According to Churchill, Ohio’s climate is just right for growing popcorn.
“If we go too far south, our quality goes down a little bit,” he said. “If we go too far north, we don't have a long enough growing pattern. So this part of the Midwest grows some of the best popcorn in the world.”
But even in the Midwest, popcorn is harder to grow than your run-of-the-mill cob.
"If you scuff those kernels of corn going through the combine, then they become old maids in a microwave bag,” Churchill said. “That kernel will not explode because it releases the moisture out of it and the moisture is what makes the popcorn pop.”
Plus, unlike most field corn, popcorn isn’t a genetically modified crop.
“So if you apply Roundup to that corn, you're going to kill it,” Churchill said. That makes it almost impossible for corporate farmers to produce popcorn on an industrial scale.
Instead, it’s mostly grown on family farms.
Ohio’s popcorn growing families
Nick Rettig’s family has been growing popcorn for longer than he can remember.
“I took my family to the movie theaters the other day, and I was like, ‘There is probably a decent chance that some of these kernels came from our farm,’” he said.
That aromatic theater snack they munched on was probably a variety called butterfly popcorn.
“So that's like what you'd get at the movie theaters, concerts, microwave bags, that sort of thing,” Rettig said. “There's also what's called mushroom popcorn, which is basically what you would get if you buy caramel corns or kettle corns or anything that has chocolate and all the yummy flavors drizzled on top of it.”
On his farm in northwest Ohio’s Henry County, Rettig held up a black and white photo from the ‘40s.
“This is our old home farm, about three miles from here,” he said. “We still farm it today, but that would be my great-grandpa and my great-great-Grandpa on the back of a wagon with a one row corn picker.”
A changing industry
Back then, popcorn was a particularly popular snack.
It was relatively cheap, so people could afford it during the Great Depression. And then, once World War II started, the U.S. sent sugar overseas to the troops, so instead of candy, Americans ate popcorn — three times as much as before, according to the Popcorn Board.
In Ohio, the industry was booming, and several Ohio cities still center their identities on the snack. Marion in central Ohio claims to be home to the world’s only popcorn museum and hosts an annual popcorn festival each September. And northeast Ohio’s Chagrin Falls celebrates the dawn of each new year by lowering a 200-plus-pound popcorn ball.
Rettig said his family used to send kernels to a TV Time Popcorn processing plant north of Napoleon. It has since closed, along with others like a pair of ConAgra Foods facilities which made Orville Redenbacher popcorn.
These days, Rettig says fewer and fewer of his neighbors are growing the crop.
“It's kind of correlated to just the shrinking population of family farms in general, and that's sad,” he said.
According to the latest Census of Agriculture, Ohio farmers planted 27,000 acres of popcorn in 2017. Five years later, they planted a little over half that – just 14,000 acres.
Rettig’s family has managed to stay in the business by merging with two other family farms with similar popcorn growing histories. Of the three, he’s the only member of the next generation involved — and he has no plans to get out of the popcorn industry.
Their kernels go all over the world, he said, to movie theaters and amusement parks, in microwave bags and packages of Skinny Pop.
“It’s kind of become a part of our identity,” he said. “It's what we are. It's what we love doing.”
