Meet Big Jack, a massive pumpkin cannon mounted to the chassis of a restored Ford F-450 Super Duty.
Big Jack, owned by Napoleon, Ohio farmer Brad Leaders, is powered by a 500-pound, 30-psi compressed air tank that’s capable of launching fall’s favorite gourd almost half a mile.
While transforming a farm-favorite F-450 into a pun’kin chunkin’ machine is quite the fall feat, this isn’t the first time the Leaders family has had some fun on the farm with the Big Blue Oval. That distinction goes to a seven-acre corn maze designed in tribute to Ford’s half-ton F-150.
“We are a multi-generation Ford-driving family,” said Kristin Leaders of Leaders Farms. “My husband Brad was reading a magazine last winter and saw the new F-150 design and loved it. We thought it would really stand out as the feature of this year’s corn maze.”
Leaders Farms & Screamacres has been entertaining Midwestern families and local schools for 18 years with corn mazes that can take up to an hour to complete. Planning, designing and growing the maze is a year-round activity, and creating the F-150 design required GPS technology to precisely cut the shape of the truck into the corn field.
When not blasting pumpkins across town and sculpting truck-shaped crop circles, the Leaders’ homestead is actually a working farm; home to 13 goats, 40 cows, and Scout, the barnyard dog.
The giant maze is expected to produce about 1,120 bushels of corn. After the maze is finished this year, the corn will be harvested and fed to cattle raised on the property.
