Ducks inside a barn at Culver Ducks Farms. Photo provided by Culver Duck Farms
Donald Wentzel, left, founder of Maple Leaf Farms, inspects a duck in the 1960s.
Photo provided by Maple Leaf Farms
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For decades, Long Island, New York, was the duck capital of America. It’s where the first Pekin ducks arrived from China in 1870, introducing the nation to the succulent white meat that quickly became a staple of fine-dining establishments.
But Long Island’s duck dynasty is long gone. These days, Indiana is king.
Since the 1960s, two farms founded two years apart and located just 45 minutes away from each other have grown into the two largest duck producers in North America.
Maple Leaf Farms, headquartered in a former high school in the tiny town of Leesburg, is by far the biggest operation. The third-generation family-owned company produces around 10 million ducks a year.
Culver Duck Farms, located in Middlebury just south of the Michigan border, traces its roots back to Long Island, where it once was the largest commercial duck farm in the world. The company moved to Indiana in 1960 and today is the second-largest operation in the nation, pumping out as many as 7 million ducks a year.
The two farms together produce about 60% of the nation’s entire duck supply.
Sean Smith, general manger at Culver Ducks, said that’s still a little known fact to most Hoosiers. For some, it’s even a little hard to believe.
“People that I have met who were born and raised here had no idea that Indiana was the leader in duck production,” he said. “When I tell them the number of ducks we raise per year, it’s almost always the same response: ‘Wow! I had no idea that many people even eat duck.’” Even for Scott Tucker, copresident of Maple Leaf Farms who started working at his family’s operation when he was just 15, the immensity of the state’s duck dominance is still a bit dumbfounding.
“It’s kind of an astonishing fact,” he said. “And it’s kind of a humbling fact. We’re very proud of the company. It’s something we take very seriously because we have over 900 employees here that we take care of.”
In total, the two companies contract with around 285 farms in northern Indiana to raise the ducks. Nearly all of the farms are run by Amish families.
Once the birds reach maturity, each business has its own processing plant where they turn the ducks into meat — and a huge assortment of other products.
In Asia, there are strong markets for duck feet, gizzards, hearts and tongues. Parts that are harder to sell are turned into pet food, since duck is hypoallergenic, meaning it’s safe for animals with allergies. Maple Leaf harvests the birds’ feathers to stuff into pillows and bedspreads.
As people in the industry like to say, they sell everything but the quack.
“That’s really the way you make money,” Tucker said. “In our industry, you find markets for everything.”
At Maple Leaf, that includes duck genetics. For decades, the company has bred and produced Pekin ducks that are especially meaty and tender. Now, they sell those genetics to companies all over the world, including in Europe and China, to breed their own big-meat birds.
A DUCK DYNASTY IS BORN
How did a state known mostly for corn and soybeans end up as the nation’s biggest player in the duck industry? The answer is, well, because of corn and soybeans.
Duck feed is made up primarily from the two grains. Maple Leaf founder Donald Wentzel first started selling that feed to farms on Long Island in the 1950s. His epiphany came when he realized it made a lot more financial sense to raise ducks closer to their food source instead of shipping it hundreds of miles. That led him to start his own small duck farm in northern Indiana after investing in a feed company nearby. When a meat processing plant came up for sale in 1958 in Milford, Wentzel bought it, and the company was born.
Culver Ducks also saw the logic of being closer to their feed source and made the move from Long Island to Middlebury in 1960. The exploding cost of real estate on the east coast also played a role in the decision. The company started producing ducks at its own Indiana facility in 1978.
Over the following decades, with easy access to food and water and a business climate friendly to agriculture, the two companies would grow exponentially and become the nation’s largest suppliers of duck.
Today, that translates into a valuable commodity that benefits Indiana’s agricultural landscape and makes the state’s staple crops even more lucrative, according to Becky Joniskan, president Indiana State Poultry Association.
“We have plenty of corn and soybeans here,” she said. “Feeding that to ducks adds a lot of value right there, and then we export that duck beyond our borders to really allow us to add one more layer of value.”
HARD TIMES AT HOME
Since the beginning, each farm struggled to convince Americans that duck is more than just a white-tablecloth delicacy for the wealthy. To that end, the companies developed pre-cooked products to make it easy for restaurants and home chefs to make duck.
In the last few years, those products have gained traction among consumers for a very unpleasant reason – the COVID-19 pandemic. With people locked in and looking to expand their homebound menu options, many turned to duck.
That trend hasn’t slowed down with the outbreak over, Smith noted.
“The overall demand for duck is increasing as consumers look for alternate proteins and the foodie community continues to grow,” the Culver Ducks general manager said.
“We have seen a lot more interest from casual restaurants as they look for something different to add to their menus to attract customers and set themselves apart.”
Like nearly every industry, the pandemic took a huge toll on duck farms. With major customers such as restaurants, cruise lines and resorts closed, sales shriveled. The uptick in pre-cooked options helped tide duck producers over.
Today, the companies face another pandemic, and one that poses an even more existential threat than COVID. In the last year, the highly contagious avian bird flu has ravaged poultry populations around the nation and triggered the deaths of more than 58 million animals.
Both Indiana farms have avoided major outbreaks and are ramping up biosecurity measures to ensure the disease doesn’t make it into their flocks. That can prove challenging with so many different farms contracted to raise the birds, Smith explained.
“The more we educate and keep it at the forefront of their everyday thinking, the more it will become habit and make them stop and think before performing an activity that could create a potential risk,” he said.
Maple Leaf’s Tucker said the last few years have posed the most difficult challenges ever faced by his company. Considering the onslaught of troubles brought on by two pandemics, it’s pretty astonishing that Indiana has maintained its status as the nation’s duck king, he noted.
Even so, Tucker likes to keep things in perspective. That’s easy to do when he looks at China’s market, where some companies are producing half-a-billion ducks a year to meet demand.
“We’re kind of small in comparison,” he said. “But you know, we’re still kind of a big duck on the small pond of North America.”
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