By Mel Luymes
A large group gathers beside the ball diamond at the Palmerston Fall Fair on August 23 for the 10th annual corn eating contest, put on by the Minto Farmers Market. In the crowd, twelve-year-old Jack Williams is sporting a bright yellow “I love corn” shirt, his prize for winning the 2024 competition. He has won the Under 13 category for the last three years in a row.
When the Rural Voice asked Williams how he prepares for such a competition, he shrugs and said he practices at the cottage sometimes with his cousin. He says there isn’t a secret, but the rumour around the fairgrounds is that he takes extra gravy on his poutine beforehand to coat his throat.
Jack Williams heads to the tables with 17 other children, lining up behind a plate of three cobs of Holzworth corn, unbuttered, unsalted.
As the familiar beat of Jackson 5’s “ABC” starts playing, they start gnawing down. They have until the end of the song to eat as many cobs as they can. Michael Holzworth and Tiffany Byrd are pulling from insulated coolers filled with warm corn, adding more cobs to their plates. They brought 20 dozen cobs out for the event.
Williams and his cousin Ross Schneider are neck and neck. The crowd cheers.
At the end of the song, about two and a half minutes later, a judge counts the total number of cobs eaten and factors in the quality of consumption – no kernels left on the ends!
With six corn cobs down the hatch, Jack Williams is declared the winner for the fourth year in a row. He smiles and waves to the audience, with corn kernels stuck to his face. He heads back to sit beside his proud dad, and local excavating contractor, Chet Williams, to watch the adult competition.
A dozen people compete in the Over 13 category, including the Ambassador of the Fair, Ebony Moroz, beside her father, Josh Moroz, the reigning champion.
15-year-old Gabe Holzworth also competed, dressed up like a cob of corn. There are two corn suits that the Holzworth family bought off Amazon. Duncan Wanless is also often seen sporting a corn suit, making several appearances as Corny the Corn Cob around the market and local events.
The adults compete to “Dueling Banjos,” slowly building to a frenzy in under three and a half minutes. It is difficult to tell who is in the lead because Ebony playfully steals her dad’s cobs.
At the end of the song, Josh has gone through 10 cobs, outdoing his previous record of nine. But beside him, Alan Greydanus, had kept up and got some extra points for quality.
Still rattled from the experience, Greydanus was declared the winner of the 2025 corn eating contest. He later commented that he was just trying to keep up with Moroz’ pace. This was not the first time Greydanus won such a high-stakes competition; in 2021 he won the Atwood Lions Club Name the Atwood Rock competition with his submission, “Cliff.”
As Mike and Tiffany cleaned up the corn and the tables, the hilarity continued as the crowd moved to the next stage, for the mullet competition.
Mike and Luke Hartung started the competition as part of a local corn roast at the Fall Fair to raise funds to support their Farmer’s Market. Over the years, it has been expected that local politicians participate as well as the Ambassadors of the Fair. Mike and Luke, both strong leaders of the Farmers Market, often participated themselves in the early days. Readers will remember Luke from the cover of the April 2024 issue of the Rural Voice.
“I’ve never actually won,” Mike smiles.
Around this corner of the world, the Holzworth name is synonymous with sweet corn. They sell it from a stand on their farm just off Perth Line 91 in the former Wallace Township. People can also find it at three local grocery stores, two roadside stands (at Teviotdale and Harriston Packers), and the Minto Farmers Market. It is also occasionally distributed through the Elmira Produce Auction.
It all started in the early 1980s when Bill and Barb Holzworth’s four children were getting stir-crazy at the end of the summer, and they wanted to give them something to do. They had a few rows of sweet corn in the garden, planted from a seed packet that had been a gift. They told their kids they could sell it at the road and keep whatever money they made.
Bill laughs as he remembers how a shy 5-year-old Mike got up on a table with a sign, waving cars down. They sold the corn for 50 cents a dozen.
The next summer, they worked with their children, Tricia (11), Mark (7), Mike (6) and Kristy (4), to plant a half acre of sweet corn. By the end of the 1980s, they were growing about 5 acres a year. Bill remembers selling 700 dozen cobs in Listowel in one go. Back then, every penny was saved and that 350 dollars helped!
Barb recalls that the children decided to pool their money and buy a four-wheeler. She and Bill had agreed and helped purchase it for the farm; it surely helped with the sweet corn. But the rule was that they were not allowed to drive it without an adult present.
Well, sure enough, Barb came driving home one winter day to see a 10-year-old Mike driving his younger sister on the four-wheeler, just as it flipped over. The machine was on Mike’s chest and Barb got it off him, and later brought him to the Listowel hospital, all the while fuming. Dr. Rutherford looked at Mike and declared he would have to admit him to the hospital, if only to save him from his mother’s wrath.
The kids helped with the sweet corn, season after season. They brought their friends over and helped pick corn. Barb says the red brick farmhouse always had plenty of friends over for dinner.
Sweet corn season is a seven-week-long marathon, at its peak between the August and September long weekends. The Holzworths start the season by planting most of the field with a few different bi-colour hybrids, from early 68-day corn to 82-day. Then they plant a few more rows of 82-day corn each week until the middle of June. They harvest by hand every morning and deliver to stores.
Even after the kids left home, Bill and Barb kept up with the sweet corn.
“I didn’t think any of them were coming back for a while there,” laughs Bill, and says they didn’t pressure any of their children into farming. But in 2010, Mike moved back to the farm.
Mike studied horticulture and agriculture at Ridgetown college, traveled a bunch of the world working on farms and returned to Ridgetown as a wheat researcher. But eventually Mike knew he had to decide whether to take over the farm or not. He moved into the house he grew up in in 2016; the next year, he married Tiffany Byrd, who he had met at Ridgetown. He now works with C&M Seeds as their research agronomist as well.
They have now expanded the sweet corn to nine acres, part of a crop rotation that includes hay, corn, beans, wheat, followed by a cover crop of oats and peas, some hog manure, then a staggered planting of sweet corn. It is planted with a six-row planter, leaving a path for a Kubota and wagon every 12 rows. Mike says it is planted more thinly than conventional corn and there are very limited herbicide options for the crop, which means more weed pressure, and something to manage in other parts of the rotation. Holzworth sweet corn is currently non-GMO, as the best-tasting varieties are not yet available with herbicide-resistant traits.
Over the past few years, Mike has even started sweet corn under clear, biodegradable plastic to get them a head start on the season. This year, he started in late April. Acting like a greenhouse, the plastic also gives the weeds a head start though, and also protects them from herbicides.
“The secret to picking good corn,” says Mike, “is to taste it raw in the field.” Every morning at 6am, they are testing corn and picking the one that is the best that day. “There are really only four days during the heat of the summer where that cob is perfect for eating,” he explains. That means that sometimes they skip a planting or a variety, in order to get the very best product to market that day.
When Mike and Tiffany sat down with the Rural Voice on September 9, there was just a week or so left in the season. Despite the extreme heat during pollination, they had an impressive and delicious crop this year. They were harvesting their last rows of the nine acres, which had been planted on June 10, and much of the corn would be donated to clubs now. Sales drop off significantly after Labour Day.
After that, they will take the field off for corn silage.
Mike and Tiffany aren’t planning to quit sweet corn anytime soon. It gives them a strong connection to the community and now the community has come to expect it, some driving by slowly by the farm or calling in to inquire how the crop is doing in July. They have a comment book at the on-farm corn stand and get friendly messages from family friends and neighbours. Tiffany also often gets large orders for 20-30 dozen for events or for people wanting to put corn away for the winter.
Every cob will have a story, they say, each one is (hopefully) going to end up on someone’s dinner plate.
And sweet corn season, despite the work, keeps the family close. Mike’s sister Kristy takes time off from her job to come back and help pick. And of course, there is Mike’s nephew, Gabe. But, they also have a family friend, Angie Gilmore, and her children helping every year, as well as a few other neighbours and friends who come from out of town to help. The farm is buzzing with people, just like old times. And at the end of the summer, they host a corn roast on the farm for friends and neighbours.
Bill and Barb are so proud of their children, each successful in their own field. They credit the work ethic that they learned in the sweet corn field. In turn, Mike and Tiffany also have young people running the corn stands for them; they are passing on the same opportunities and responsibilities to the next generation.
As for Bill, he says he never worked anywhere but the farm. He had moved to the red brick farmhouse in 1961 with his family, quit school to farm when he was 16, met Barb through Junior Farmers and just as soon as they married in 1970, his father passed away. They sold some farms in the transition, but Bill bought some land back in the 1970s. He raised beef cattle for a time but got out of it for a while.
In the 1980s, when some neighbours were getting out of dairy, they gave the Holzworths a Holstein cow so they would have enough milk. They remember milking the cow by hand every morning. When that cow dried off, the neighbour was going to give Bill another one, but Bill insisted that he buy this one. He ended up breeding that Holstein with a Hereford bull and started back into beef cattle. They bred those offspring with Simental semen and later introduced Angus, using bull genetics from both the McKinlays (Grey County) and Marywood (Wellington). The herd is now about 60 beef cattle that keep Mike and Tiffany busy on the farm when they aren’t rushing around during sweet corn season, or farming the other 450 acres, some of which is certified organic.
As for Barb, after a time working at Midwestern Regional Centre, she worked in the high school cafeteria for 15 years and is beloved by a whole generation of local 30-somethings.
The Holzworth family is one of the backbones of the community, giving back whenever they can. Mike and Tiffany have long supported the Minto Farmers Market as vendors, established in 2011 and running every Saturday morning at the old Palmerston train station. They donate corn to the Reapers of Hope, where it is dehydrated and used in soups for those in need.
As well, they donate the corn for Dave and Jean Anderson’s Christmas, which is a sit-in or take-away Christmas dinner offered free to the whole community every Christmas Day. As the Rural Voice caught up with Barb and Bill Holzworth, they had just put away the corn from 30 dozen cobs the day before. Barb used a no-blanch recipe (passed to her by Mrs. Horst) that has become the go-to way of freezing corn in the area.
24 cups raw corn kernels, cut from the cob
6 cups water
6 tsp. salt
½ cup sugar
Mix it, bag it, freeze it and then just heat it up when you’re ready.
As for fresh on the cob, everyone has their favourite way to do up corn, say the Holzworths. Some like soaking them in the husk and cooking them on the grill. But perhaps the easiest way to do corn on the cob for a big group is to place the husked corn in a cooler, pour boiling water over them and cover it. This keeps them hot, without over-cooking them.
Holzworth sweet corn shows that tradition can be tasted as much as it can be told. May this year’s harvest bring abundance and plenty of sweet moments to every farm family. ◊