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When harvest ends, Jim Cuddeback starts making popcorn
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
WASHINGTON — Jim Cuddeback has used about a half-acre of his family’s century farm to grow popcorn for the last 20 years or so, by his estimation, although his family suspects it’s been longer than that.
The hobby has become something of a postharvest ritual for the longtime farmer west of Washington. Cuddeback grows about 1,300 pounds of the stuff every year, and it usually takes over a month to process it all into a poppable product. It’s a different species from the corn he grows for grain, and has to be harvest with a corn-picker, rather than a combine.
About 90% of the final product is donated to people and companies the Cuddebacks do business with, as a way to say thanks. Of the popcorn that gets sold at all, Cuddeback said it mostly went to people who wanted more than they were already offered for free.
“I enjoy doing it, I enjoy giving the popcorn away,” he said. “It just creates good will. Businesses know who I am when I walk in the door, they recognize me because I bring the popcorn … and I never ask for favors because I do it, but you know, it doesn’t hurt to have them appreciate the popcorn.”
The family eats popcorn at least once a week, usually as a Sunday night tradition. Cuddeback used to buy the snack from a friend, but started growing his own when he realized how many mice could get into the other farmer’s wooden grain wagon. This year, Cuddeback filled his own steel trailer about two thirds of the way with popcorn ears.
Today, it’s a way for the farmer to stay busy once the busy season winds down. Cuddeback processes one five-gallon bucket — about 40 pounds of popcorn — almost every day for around a month after harvest ends. He’ll put off some of the workload for deer season, or whatever else comes up from one year to the next, but it’s quite the involved process.
His family members say the hobby is a blessing for a man who struggles to sit still.
“I look at the amount of time involved in this, shake my head, and say, ‘I will not keep this up when he no longer wants to,’” said Jeff Cuddeback, Jim’s son. “Idle time does not serve him well.”
While Jim Cuddeback has popcorn processing down to a science, most of his equipment is fairly low-tech. The journey starts at harvest, when a neighbor’s out-of-use corn picker — manufactured in the ‘40s — is hooked up to a tractor and pulled through the rows of popcorn, separating the ears from the stock. While the machine is antiquated and spare parts are hard to come by, Cuddeback said more modern harvesting tools weren’t an option.
“If we were commercial, you would combine it, but it would be impossible for us to get the old corn and beans out of the combine clean enough to not mix this stuff with it,” he said. “We’d have to spend weeks cleaning it out.”
After hand-shucking each ear, Cuddeback feeds them into a corn shelling machine made sometime in the 1800s. While the original contraption was hand-turned, he’s hooked it up to an electric motor to save time.
The shelled corncobs are kept for fire kindling, while the kernels are poured into an old-fashioned cement mixer and left rotating for 10-20 minutes to knock any hard, inedible residue from the kernels. The product is then poured down a homemade ramp covered in fans, which blow the flakes — Cuddeback calls them bee’s wings — into the air, and out of the corn.
After that, Cuddeback feeds the grain into another century-old device called a clipper mill, which he bought from a business partner after years of cleaning the kernels by hand. After a few passes through that, he tests the moisture, and either packages the product in leftover milk jugs and bottles, or puts them under an old pigpen heat lamp to dry out.
While the operation may seem a little slapped together, Cuddeback’s final product is remarkably consistent.
“It’s got to be between 13% and 14% moisture to pop,” he said. “If it’s exactly 14, I’ll let it run another hour or two, to get it down under 14, where I want it.”
Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com
