Pumpkin Season, Explained

09.16.22

Just south of San Francisco, in the small beach town of Half Moon Bay, California, thousands of giant pumpkin growers converge. Home to the annual Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off — the “Kentucky Derby” of pumpkin contests — the 1st place winner receives the world’s biggest prize at $9/pound, plus the chance at a $30,000 mega-prize if their pumpkin breaks the world record (currently held by a Tuscan farmer, who nurtured a 2,702 pounder in 2021).

In Half Moon Bay, the provenance of pumpkin seeds provokes more interest than that of racehorses. The best “stud pumpkin” seeds — almost all originated from the Atlantic Giant (AG) line first patented by Howard Dill in 1979 — can command up to $1,600 for a single specimen at auction.

“Unlike pumpkin farmers in the past, who were laissez-faire about their crop, AG growers incessantly pamper their pumpkins, leaving as little as possible to chance,” writes author Cindy Ott in Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. “Success depends on a delicate balance between providing the plant with enough water and nutrients for it to achieve its full potential weight and not overdoing it so that it cracks, rots, or, even worse, explodes before show time.”

Growers fondly recall babysitting their pumpkins for up to 40 hours a week over a five-month period, skipping summer vacations to whisper to their gourds and feed them an intensive diet of over three hundred gallons of water (or milk) a day. Wayne Hackney, a hobbyist grower from New Milford, Connecticut, estimated that growing an AG pumpkin “cost me a dollar a pound.” The cost, he concluded, “was worth it.”

All that pampering has paid off: pumpkins just keep getting bigger. “I hope I can see 3,000. Maybe 3,500. Heck, we might have the first two-ton pumpkin out there. It could happen,” says Dave Stelts, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization he compares to “the Olympic Organizing Committee of competitive vegetable growing,” and “the Good Housekeeping Seal of weigh-off sites.”

Why pumpkins? Part of it is pure visual spectacle. “A twenty-ounce apple is impressive, but it cannot compete with a 128-pound pumpkin,” writes Ott. Another part is Americans’ strange cultural affinity towards the gourd, an obsession that has ballooned into hundreds of pumpkin festivals, pumpkin boats, pumpkin donuts, pumpkin candles, and, of course, the $600 million Pumpkin Spice Latte habit perpetuated by Starbucks. For many, the mere sight of a pumpkin has become synonymous with “crisp air and pies and smiles on an October night.”

Curiously, pumpkins’ newfound prestige is a dramatic departure from their historical treatment. Long considered a worthless field crop — good for animal feed or as a dire supplement for the rural poor — pumpkins had a humble place in the farm economy but little commercial value as an export or commodity. Today, the tables have turned, and pumpkin farming is now a viable economic strategy for thousands of small and medium-sized farms who capitalize on the fruit’s national appeal to tap into new value streams from local consumers.

Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin

“Instead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies
Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon
If it was not for pumpkin, we should be undone.”

— Colonial song, 1630s

Pumpkins were long a staple food of civilizations thanks to their massive output, late harvest time, general hardiness, and the ability to grow in the most inconvenient of environments, including dung heaps and compost piles. “I presume there is not a vegetable on the face of the earth more easily raised, or that is more productive, when it is considered that they will grow among corn, potatoes, or on any waste of ground, and that the seed of one pumpkin will produce cartloads of fruit,” attested one early New York grower.

Their popularity as a Native American food crop — second only to corn — did little to recommend them to European arrivals. “The kinds of food which the savages like best, and which they make the most effort to obtain, are the Indian corn, the kidney-bean, and the squash,” recorded one incredulous French explorer in 1700. “If they are without these, they think they are fasting, no matter what abundance of meat and fish they have in their stores.”

Within a few decades of settling Jamestown and Plymouth, “pumpkin eating” became the mark of the desperately poor. Colonists were routinely ridiculed by Europeans as backwater “pumpkinheads,” and clergyman Nathaniel Ward famously accused the Puritans of having “pumpkin-blasted brains.” Whereas squash varieties were given distinguished names such as the “Commodore Porter Valparaiso,” pumpkins were christened the “possum-nosed pumpkin” and the “Jonathan pumpkin,” a popular nickname for an unsophisticated country rube.

Nonetheless, Americans continued to eat them. Thanks to the prohibitive cost of imports, pumpkins proved an economical substitute for a wide variety of food items, including apples, barley, and meat. And yet, while nearly every farmer grew them, no commercial market developed for pumpkins. “While international trade in rice, tobacco, fish, furs, and wheat made family fortunes, there was no profit in pumpkins,” writes Ott. “Overseas commerce was the route to prosperity, and little demand existed for the American vegetable.”

Sentiments towards the pumpkin changed with the turn of the eighteenth century. The country developed its own national identity, and the public came to value the pumpkin for its uniquely American characteristics. In 1796, Amelia Simmons published the first national cookbook, American Cookery, a kitchen staple that transformed “the pumpkin from [an] uninspired side dish into glorified dessert.”

“Although the pumpkin never provided colonists with surplus wealth or cultural cachet, it always gave them something to eat, and in that lay a story for a new democratic nation,” writes Ott. “Making the lowly pumpkin — a vegetable Europeans stigmatized as primitive and rustic — a delicacy and publishing a recipe for it in the first American cookbook was a powerful expression of American pride and independence.”

Artists latched onto the symbol, associating the pumpkin with a simpler time before industrialism overtook the country and citizens were corrupted by love for profit and gold. Henry David Thoreau cemented the pumpkin’s status as a natural icon when he included long, rhapsodic passages about his pumpkin patch (and the first giant pumpkin planted on American soil) in Walden. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” wrote Thoreau. “I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in a fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.”

Who Grows Pumpkins?

Modern pumpkin farming, unlike nearly every other farm crop, has remained a local operation undertaken by small producers scattered across the nation. Thanks to the pumpkin’s ability to survive a multitude of climates, nearly every state, with the exception of Florida, can support local growers. “Though six States account for nearly half of U.S. production, pumpkins are grown in virtually every State of the union,” reports the USDA. Demand for pumpkins has consistently climbed since the late 1970s, with US production rising by 31 percent from 2000 to 2014.

Another factor contributing to pumpkin production’s hyper-localization is their weight. “No trucker in his right mind wants to haul pumpkins,” said a Toledo-based broker, citing the prohibitive cost of cross-country shipments. For ornamental pumpkins, in particular, long-distance shipping poses too much risk to damaging their appearance — nobody wants a pumpkin with a sunken cheek or a decapitated stem. Instead, regional suppliers are the norm, usually shipping no further than 75 miles from the farm.

Pumpkin production is divided between ornamental and processing producers. Illinois, home to Libby’s central processing plant, has long been the nation’s top pumpkin producer, accounting for nearly 95% of processing pumpkins and producing enough cans in the 2010s to bake 90 million pumpkin pies annually. Dozens of local farmers contract with the plant to grow the Libby’s Select, a hideous, beige pumpkin bred specifically for its thick, pie-friendly orange flesh. “Everything about the vegetable is suggestive of a squash, but the company calls it a pumpkin for obvious reasons,” comments Ott.

While processing farms produce more product, ornamental growers generally reap higher profits per acre thanks to the markup they command at wholesale and local markets. “You can buy pumpkins at the store,” explained one farmer, “but the farm atmosphere attracts people. We are trying to keep our farm as ‘farmy’ as possible and not commercialize it.”

Many farmers began with a small plot of ornamental pumpkins, only to dramatically increase their pumpkin allocation in response to eager urban tourists. “We got into pumpkin growing through the back door,” commented Don Nivens, a former apple farmer in northern South Carolina. He started with a quarter acre of production only to ramp up to production to seven acres after “pumpkins save[d] his financial skin.”

And, despite the narrow window of demand — growers’ sales typically peak during a four-week window from late September to October — some creative farmers have found secondary markets for any leftover product. Robert Lewis, a pumpkin farmer in Maryland, averages an 85-percent yield for his crop and sells the remainder to local cattle farmers as feed. In New Jersey, hunters are another market for old pumpkins, using the flesh as deer bait.

Pumpkin Nation

“Guess what season it is — f**king fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant f**king squash.”

— Colin Nissan, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherf**kers

Today, a number of small towns across America vie for the title of “pumpkin capital of the world.” As the popularity of pumpkin festivals spread, many small towns witnessed a full-scale revival thanks to the deluge of tourists desperate to see the “vaunted orange orb,” as one promoter calls it. Many events, including the Hudson Valley’s Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, Cox Farm’s legendary Fall Festival, and, of course, Half Moon Bay’s annual giant pumpkin weigh-off, have attracted regional renown and resurrected these areas as viable economic enterprises in the 21st century.

Morton, home to Libby’s famed processing plant, now views the pumpkin as “an icon and visual calling card for [the town].” In Half Moon Bay, which attracts more than 250,000 annual visitors, the town has used the festival’s proceeds to fund urban development projects and local nonprofits. “The Pumpkin Festival has done more for this city, by far, than any other thing in the city’s history,” said former city manager Fred Mortensen.

America’s love affair with pumpkins, it seems, has only just begun. “Have you ever heard anybody say a bad word about a pumpkin? No,” says one champion grower. “Pumpkins could solve the world’s problems. Honestly, everybody loves a pumpkin, they do, and to see one grow that big.”

About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.