Quality control can be simpler in some ways at a small business than a large corporation. At Amish Country Popcorn, for example, every variety produced for it under contract is grown within a 10-mile radius by farmers known personally to owner Brian Lehman.
They all are benefiting from the great conditions they saw for popcorn production near the end of last year’s growing season, he said.
“The previous year we had way too much rain and did not have a very good crop,” Lehman said in reference to the popcorn yield. “Last year we had better conditions.”
Wet conditions last spring and summer contributed to concerns that the early-season damage of 2015 would be repeated, but the weather was drier and warmer than normal at the end of the growing season, which created perfect conditions for the record-setting crop.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the nation’s popcorn production rose 45 percent last year to a record 4.46 million hundredweight, which was almost 500 million pounds above the 2015 harvest.
Indiana farmers planted 94,000 acres of popcorn last year, which was 9,000 more than 2015. They harvested 93,000 acres of the crop, which was a 10,000-acre increase.
The crop’s price per hundredweight was lower last year at $16 than it was at $16.50 in 2015, and at $18.90 in 2014.
The good conditions “gave me good quality and plenty of popcorn to sell, Lehman said. “It gives me a good supply to work off of.”
The way supply and demand affects commodity pricing, last year’s good crop “keeps the price down,” he said. But, growers still made more on the crop than they did in the prior year because they had more of it to sell.
Indiana’s 2016 popcorn yield was 30 percent higher than the previous year’s, according to the Indiana field office of the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“Our most recent record-setting year was 2014, but the 2016 production numbers and acres planted and harvested are quite a bit higher than that year, with the yield being identical,” Greg Matli, state statistician for the office, said in a statement. “The moisture conditions ended up sustaining the crop through the entire growing season.”
Lehman got into the popcorn business at age six when his dad let him use a small plot to grow the crop for the extra money he could make selling it to classmates and teachers at school.
After graduating from high school, he decided the part-time business he had started as a student with an acre of popcorn had full-time potential, and he increased his production to 25 acres.
Today, Lehman and his suppliers harvest eight varieties of popcorn from a few thousand acres each year for his Berne-based Amish Country Popcorn, which sells a majority of it to area stores.
The company also sells popcorn online along with cooking ingredients such as coconut oil and ball park popcorn salt, and it supplies a number of wholesale customers who resell all those products on Amazon.
A couple of its standout products are blue popcorn, which pops white, and mushroom popcorn, which pops in a ball. A supplier also is working on developing a smaller type of popcorn with Amish Country Popcorn in mind, Lehman said.
Building the 47-year-old business has been sufficiently challenging that Lehman believes its current level success would not have been possible without providence and “a great wife to stand behind me through tough times,” he said.
“We kept trying different angles until we got our market built. It was not easy. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to go out and try this,” he said. “It allows me to do farming, which I love, and to meet a lot of people. There’s never a boring day.”
Americans eat 14 billion quarts of popcorn each year and Indiana is among the nation’s nine major popcorn producing states, according to the Popcorn Board, a nonprofit check-off group formed to promote the snack.
At least 98 percent of kernels should pop in good popcorn, and popped kernels should achieve an expansion ratio of at least 35 to one, according to industry standards the group supports. With moisture content of 13.5 percent ideal for popping, all popcorn should be stored in airtight containers.