“Sweet corn is better than money,” says an Illinois farmer who uses the former to get things the latter can’t easily buy. Richard Layden’s sweet corn fetches great seats at ball games, shady McCormick Place parking spots, a prime location for the Labor Day weekend 49th Annual National Sweetcorn Festival.
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The Vermilion County native says he’s the only fresh-market corn producer still operating near this town of 5,000. Hoopeston’s claim to fame is the invention of the machine that puts lids on cans. The nickname of the high school’s teams is Corn Jerkers; some 12,000 acres of sweet corn are cultivated in the area, almost all under contract with canners.
Farmers, Layden explains, don’t want to worry about the daily demands of customers at the driveway, deliveries to grocery stores, or staggered plantings and harvests. Layden makes 21 plantings on 22 acres in the spring, then harvests two rows each day of the 50-day session. But he says that leaves plenty of time for raising feed corn and soybeans.
Remembering the taste of great sweet corn at a Democratic Party golf outing, a congressional aide recommended that Layden be one of the farmers to meet Jimmy Carter when he visited Springfield in 1980. “There were three farmers, a few folks from the farm press, and a few local agribusinessmen,” Layden recalls. “We met the night before and chose this agricultural communications specialist from the university as our spokesman. He was going to talk to the president during this 15-minute session over coffee. This fellow froze up and said nothing. So I said, ‘Mr. President, I wanted to bring you some asparagus today, but the security men wouldn’t let me.’ Carter was disappointed. He said he loves fresh asparagus. I asked how often he farms. He said he didn’t have much time for farming but likes to get on a tractor when he goes home to Georgia. I told him, ‘We’ve had a wet spring, but I’m going into the fields this afternoon. If you want to come back to my farm, you can help me.’”
