I've got a neighbor that grows a few hundred acres of it every year. Runs it through the combine, though it leaves quite a bit of waste. Thats not a bad thing though, as the pheasants love the stuff. Just about all of them shot around here have craws full of popcorn.

Oh I have had a carving that I started last fall and still not done. LOL

I have grown the Strawberry pink and the blue popcorn, plus several varieties of dent corn in smaller patches. We had better overall luck with the blue. The dent corns I grow to grind into cornmeal. It works best if doing smaller quantities to plant them in square blocks rather than in rows for pollination. I have an antique sheller similar to the one pictured but here in the last few years they have gotten harder to find and expensive, around here anyways. Pleasant Hill Grain has a modern reproduction of the smaller variety that seems to be well made and perfect for smaller projects. I was going to get one but came across the one I have now.

Some years ago, Orville Redenbacher had growers in Northwest Indiana. Thinking Chesterton to Valparaiso area. Don't know the harvest method, but would assume combine.

Nebraska is the number 1 popcorn state and Indiana is number 2. The farm I worked for in southern Indiana grew 350 acres. I don’t remember what varieties they planted. A couple other farms in the area grew nothing but popcorn, with soybean rotations. It is all harvested with a combine just like yellow and white corn.
The 2 popcorn processing plants they shipped to was in northern Indiana and the other in Missouri. The years I worked on the farm, the popcorn company sent trucks to haul for us. It was a 6 hr trip to either plant so they would pickup a load and go to the Indiana plant. Backhaul corn to the Ohio river, pickup another load of popcorn and head back to Missouri.

It got so hot one summer that the popcorn popped while on the stalk. Our mule thought it was snow and froze to death.

Rickey

I grew several varieties last year - strawberry, improved, and a purple one. It was pretty but small kernels and not worth the effort. Buying a bag of commercial pop corn better.