This time of year, Donald Newhard’s mornings run like clockwork. Six days a week, a quarter after 5 a.m., you’ll find him exactly where he wants to be: in the seat of his tractor, picking sweet corn one row at a time.
“We love growing sweet corn,” Newhard says. “We’re not crazy about picking it in the dark, in the wet, and all of that.”
But the early hours pay off fast. A single wagon load, filled in about 20 minutes, holds roughly 300 dozen ears.
It isn’t just any sweet corn. In Coplay, Pennsylvania, situated the heart of the Lehigh Valley, Newhard Farms Corn Shed has become something close to a local institution. And the numbers back it up.
“We grow about 70 acres of sweet corn, and I’d say 75% of that goes through the market here, and then the rest is for wholesale,” Newhard says. “On a good weekend, [we go through] 1,200 dozen, 1,300 dozen on a Saturday or Sunday.”
That’s a single weekend. Did he ever imagine the business would grow this large?
“Never, never, never,” he says. “It just grows and grows.”
From a Kids’ Wagon to a Bustling Farm Store
Newhard is a fourth-generation farmer, but he’s the first in his family to take sweet corn to this kind of scale. The operation didn’t start with a business plan. It started as something for the kids to do.
“It started as a hobby for the kids, started with a little wagon out front, and then moved to a small building that we put there, a portable building, and a 12’ by 16’,” Newhard says. “And then we built a store, and we’ve been adding on ever since. And there’s plans for a new store coming.”
That small shed has since grown into a bustling retail store just off the highway, perfectly positioned on the edge of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a growing customer base that keeps discovering it.
Quality Over Quantity
Every bag that leaves the Newhard store holds 13 ears, all machine-picked but hand-selected, with a level of quality control the family believes is the real secret to their success.
“You never want that plant to have a bad day. If it needs water, it gets water. If it needs nutrients, it gets nutrients,” Newhard says.
New rows are planted every few days from spring through the beginning of July, keeping fresh corn coming out of the fields every single day for three months straight. The formula is simple, Newhard says, and it’s one that’s helped him pivot as farmland around him has disappeared under new subdivisions.
“As long as we give our customer 13 beautiful ears, it just seems to be growing and growing,” he says. “If I can’t grow field corn because of all the houses, maybe I can sell them sweet corn.”
Farming on the Edge of Growth
New rooftops mean new customers walking through the store’s doors, but the same growth is also fueling the Newhards’ biggest challenge for the field corn, soybeans and sweet corn they grow.
“Biggest challenge is, well, losing farmland,” Newhard says. “It’s tough maintaining fertility and long-range plans when a lot of the land I am farming is eventually for sale, unfortunately. As you get away from the generation that rented it to me or my father, the next generation doesn’t care so much. And that’s a real concern: the disappearance of farmland in the Lehigh Valley.”
With roughly 860,000 people now calling the greater Lehigh Valley home, farmland is scarce, and what the Newhards do farm tends to be small and scattered.
“Our average field size is 13 acres, because we have all the houses and all the development around us. So my son and I farm roughly 300 fields with 52 landlords,” he says.
Still, Newhard sees a future in it.
“I used to worry about that, about not having enough land or not being able to make a living here,” he says. “And now I have the next generation. My son, who’s running the operation, is here, and his kids want to farm. And I worry about that.”
Technology Levels the Playing Field
With housing development as their biggest competitor for ground, the Newhards have leaned hard into technology to make the most of every acre they do have.
“We have large enough equipment. We have 35-foot combines, we have 40-foot planters, even for our small fields,” Newhard says. “But by using all that technology, it all fits, and we can maintain productivity as we move from one field to another to another to another. Every piece of technology gives us a little bit more of an edge.”
That edge is being sharpened by the next generation: Donald’s son, Joel, and grandson, Ethan, a sixth-generation farmer who at just 23 has fully embraced precision ag as a daily necessity.
“We’ve absolutely, without a doubt, felt that we have an edge over some of our neighbors around here,” Ethan says. “We can tell you exactly how much we’re making on this acre, and it’s less, because we’re using variable seeding and variable fertilizer. We’re not over-applying, we’re not under-applying. We’re getting that perfect amount of nutrient to that crop.”
Auto-guidance technology, in particular, has become indispensable given how irregular the family’s fields are.
“We have 305 different fields. Not a single one of them is square. To drive them perfectly and not run over any corn, even on 30-inch rows, is almost impossible. That auto path will drive up a hill, drive around a curve, and no issue,” Ethan explains.
The fields range from just one acre to 100 acres, and the family maps every one of them through AutoPath. “We take every year and go in and push through those maps to update all of our boundaries. It knows where the gutters are, it knows where the edge of the fields is. We can get a perfect, accurate acre count every year,” he says.
With so many fields scattered across the valley, keeping track of it all would be nearly impossible without the data at his fingertips.
“It is very hard to think about and remember what you did three, four, five months ago,” Ethan says. “When you’re harvesting, I can be in the combine, pull up my phone to see what happened in the field. We didn’t plant here, or the fertilizer ran out at the end of the field. It maps everything, and we have it at the tip of our fingers.”
Variable Rate as a Means of Survival
For Donald, variable-rate technology has shifted from a nice-to-have to something closer to essential.
“We did variable rate fertilizer for about seven, eight years, maybe a little bit longer. But where we saw the benefit was if we just increased population, we were not getting a yield bump. But when we started to increase fertilizer in certain parts of the field, we would see a yield increase,” says Donald.
Now, every acre is planted and fertilized from a prescription.
“We do everything with prescriptions,” Newhard says. “All the scripts go into the fertilizer spreader, and then all the scripts also go into the planter. The two of them match, and I think we’re getting more bang for the buck. Our yields have been steadily increasing each and every year. The goal is all about yield and doing it as economically as you can, and this is working.”
With around 60 different landlords across their scattered ground, that same technology has also become a communication tool.
“We variable-rate every acre of soybeans and field corn,” Ethan says. “That goes back to the landlords. We can take their specific ground conditions and say, we want this amount of seed in this dirt. Our fields are all very different. They’re not a blanket rating, anything.”
Passing the Torch
As Donald watches the next generation find its footing on the farm, he’s embracing what comes next, including stepping back himself.
“You’ve already done succession planning, so you’re okay stepping back a bit?” he’s asked. “I am,” he says. “Because they still let me drive tractor, so it’s nice. Our operation is large enough that there’s things that I do, and I am responsible for, but I don’t have to make the decisions. So that’s great.”
“It’s a wonderful time in my life to watch the next generation coming along,” he adds. “I didn’t want to be one of those people that wouldn’t get out of the way, as I’ve read about so many farms.”
Donald says the next chapter of Newhard Farms may look different than the last six generations. But if those six generations have proven anything, it’s that the best chapters are often rooted in change.
“I’m excited for the future,” he says. “I’m excited to see what the next generation is going to do. I think I gave it a pretty good shot to get it to here. And so now, let’s see what’s on the horizon. But I’m excited; I really am.”
