9 ms·

The economics of pumpkin patches

88 points by Anon84 5y ago

jjmellon 5y ago
The article's profit calculations assume that every pumpkin grown can be sold. If you take a drive in the countryside today (last day of sale before Hallowe'en), you'll see this is not the case. Huge piles of pumpkins still at the farm stores, and fields full of unharvested pumpkins. I believe the likely explanation for pumpkin patch economics is that pumpkins serve as a loss leader to attract customers to a farm store.
- irrational 5y ago
  But, the chart clearly showed that 50-75% of the pumpkins cannot be sold.
  - jjmellon 5y ago
    The chart shows that 25% to 50% are not "capable" of being sold. I think this refers to losses in the field, such as unripe, overripe, insect or animal damage, etc. However, the article ignores the fact that many of the ones that are capable of being sold are never sold.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      Why would they ignore that, but include losses in the field? Without more information, I assume the "not capable of being sold" number includes unsold units too.
      - ViViDboarder 5y ago
        It’s possible, but doesn’t seem that way to me. That explicitly mention field damage and so forth but don’t mention unsold pumpkins.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Is there a different type of pumpkin for pumpkin puree? Or could they not be used as animal feed? And why can't you sell the seeds? The article quotes ~$100/1k seeds. That's $0.10 per seed. There are ~250 seeds per pumpkin - that's $25 per pumpkin. What am I missing?
      - Isamu 5y ago
        The small “sugar pumpkins” are generally used for canning. I think those are harvested with much less waste.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - rp1 5y ago
        I doubt farmers would buy seeds for $100 / 1k seeds after the first season unless harvested seeds were not viable for planting or if the seeds were some type of specialized hybrid whose license prevented farmers from replanting their own seeds. Both possibilities would exclude selling the seeds for profit.
      - lathyrus_long 5y ago
        As to the seeds, a reputable vendor isn't just starting with any random fruit. Even for an open-pollinated variety, you want large separation distances from other varieties to avoid unwanted cross-pollination, potentially miles. You can also grow indoors, but that's more expensive and requires hand-pollination or introduced pollinators. You also need more careful artificial selection (roguing), to avoid long-term degradation of the genetics. For an F1 hybrid you need to do all this work to maintain each of the pure lines, and then also do the cross. Once you have the fruit, the seed needs to be separated, dried, perhaps tested for viral, bacterial, or fungal disease, perhaps treated with fungicide, and tested for germination. Of course a random pumpkin seed will grow with some probability, and the resulting plant will bear some kind of pumpkin. But the cost of high-quality seed is a very small share of the total cost of growing a pumpkin, so it's not a good place to cut corners. ETA: And the article notes explicitly that those seeds were hybrids. For emphasis, saving seeds from hybrids may or may not be legally permissible, depending on the patent status and any contracts signed, but with very few exceptions it doesn't work--the genetics aren't stable, and the F2 doesn't reliably have the same desirable traits as the F1.
- beauzero 5y ago
  That's why you have pigs. In the South (USA) pumpkin patches, corn mazes, and apple farms are only profitable with weekend day treks sold to urban/subdivision bound parents looking to get their kids outside. Pumpkins sold in Aldi's cost about $5 and we have paid as much as $60 for a similar pumpkin picked out by one of our kids. It gets us all out of the house and helps local farms.
paulcole 5y ago
I like how the article takes a hard turn from statistics: > Americans are expected to spend a record $10B+ on Halloween items in 2021, up from $8B last year — and pumpkins are a big player: Among the 65% of Americans celebrating Halloween this year, 44% (~94m people) plan to carve one. Straight to vague generalities: > While pumpkins can readily be found at most grocery stores, many folks turn to a patch to procure their autumnal canvas. It's like the person writing the article went in wanting to write about pumpkin patches but pumpkin patches aren't as common as they hoped so they plowed ahead anyway.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Or the person just wanted to write about pumpkin patches, did that, and getting statistics on them was impossible considering how informal they are.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Feels like the statistics of how many people buy pumpkins at pumpkin patches could be important to an article titled the economics of pumpkin patches.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Or that's how clickbait articles work
  - detaro 5y ago
    How is the article clickbait? What did you expect based on the headline that you didn't get?
    - SamBam 5y ago
      Seriously. It's called "The economics of pumpkin patches," not "10 weird things you didn't know about pumpkins," and it literally discusses the economics of pumpkin patches with actual data. "Clickbait" now means "an article that sounds interesting to me."
monkeydust 5y ago
I went to a patch with the kids over the weekend here in UK. It was fun but when it got time to pay we joined a long queue with others having our pumpkins in a wheel barrow. When we got to the front we had to match our pumpkins to a template based on size (cost from 50p to £10) and then a cashier would tally up the total. I got chatting to the owner whilst waiting and he was open to a more tech smarter way to pay to avoid the queues. Anyone have ideas on how to do this, ideally using existing tech mashed together in a low/no code way? So flow would be ... - Move your barrow under a camera. - It would take a picture and through image recognition identify and classify pumpkins based on size. - This would be pushed to cashier with total. - Maybe where confidence level on classification was low it would prompt human intervention. To me weighing the barrow would be another, perhaps better, solution but the farmer wasnt keen on this and ran out of time to dig deeper!
- itronitron 5y ago
  If each pumpkin was passed down a conveyor belt in a single file line then it's diameter could be easily measured with an array of light sensors aimed vertically which could be used to set the price in the checkout system. Different customer's orders could be separated by a board that spanned the full width of the sensor array, which would stop the conveyor until it was removed.
- david38 5y ago
  Weight is the simplest by far. 50, Otherwise, build a box, and the smallest box that fit the pumpkin determines its size.
  - odyssey7 5y ago
    I wonder if they run into issues selling by weight. Customers are usually paying more for the visual size, not however much water a particular item has in it. Does the weight increase linearly with size? If it’s especially hollow, probably not, while an especially large and hollow pumpkin may be uncommon and should be sold for a high price. Edit: I guess a better question would be, can you predict desirable carving qualities and visual size accurately as a function of pumpkin weight?
madiator 5y ago
I have mixed feelings about Halloween. On the one hand, it has a great social aspects to it: people get together for carving, there are parties, and kids have so much fun. But the environmental and health sides of it mindboggling. We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away; we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the landfill; and we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown (which is probably better than eating them).
- syedkarim 5y ago
  Can’t a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?
  - madiator 5y ago
    People buy a lot of stuff during Christmas, but they get used. EDIT: I think so.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      If I had to guess, probably 80% of the stuff I've received over the years as Christmas gifts ends up getting used very little and then unceremoniously put on a shelf or in the trash. And that may be a generous estimate.
    - jonhohle 5y ago
      We let our kids wear their costumes for play the rest of the year. They get worn more in a few play sessions than on Halloween. Also, roasted pumpkin seeds are easy, healthy, and delicious. I wonder if after growing, harvesting, shipping, etc. a Halloween pumpkin is carbon negative.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Christmas so far outranks Halloween in consumer spending, I can't imagine anyone worrying much about the paltry 10B we will spend in 2021 on Halloween. Christmas will be 100x bigger.
- 5y ago
ashtonkem 5y ago
The farm we go to rotates which field is used as their season pumpkin patch on a year by year basis. We wondered if there was some crop rotation benefit to doing that, like maybe pumpkins fix nitrogen so they’re a good intermittent crop between other nitrogen depleting species.
- ImprovedSilence 5y ago
  Pumpkin is a type of squash. Squash, bean, and corn is the “three sisters” so it makes sense those other ones could be rotated in.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Three things (from my experience at our little market garden farm): Cucurbits (squashes, gourds, pumpkins, zuchinis, etc.) are heavy feeders. They use a lot of nitrogen, require fairly rich soil. So they're typical grown in recently amended soil. So growing them multiple years in a row in the same spot has some challenges. They attract quite a few pests (fungal and insect). But those pests tend to be specific to cucurbits (or Cucurbitaceae, including melons, etc.). So it's a good idea to rotate them out so that overwintering pests in the plot don't have a free snack the next year. Finally, they make a good crop to plant at the beginning of a rotation because they grow quickly and cover the ground, blocking the sun and drowning out many weeds. So a good way to bring new land into production or to get some perennial weeds out of a plot that you want to use for something else the next year.
dougSF70 5y ago
To be honest, it's a once a year event hence their popularity. A line (queue) comes with the experience. No need for tech / AI assisted solutions? Eyeball the size is the fastest method and people who go to pumpkin patches are happy to pay a premium.
jdkee 5y ago
The linked article cites ~770 tons of pumpkins. But the source the article cites 13,751 thousands of cwt. A cwt is 100 pounds, so the total production is ~1.37 billion pounds or 687,500 tons. How can we trust the rest of the calculations in this article if the data is so far off? See https://www.statista.com/statistics/192975/us-pumpkin-production-since-2001/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192975/us-pumpkin-produc...

88 points by Anon84 5y ago

The article's profit calculations assume that every pumpkin grown can be sold. If you take a drive in the countryside today (last day of sale before Hallowe'en), you'll see this is not the case. Huge piles of pumpkins still at the farm stores, and fields full of unharvested pumpkins. I believe the likely explanation for pumpkin patch economics is that pumpkins serve as a loss leader to attract customers to a farm store.

irrational 5y ago
But, the chart clearly showed that 50-75% of the pumpkins cannot be sold.
- jjmellon 5y ago
  The chart shows that 25% to 50% are not "capable" of being sold. I think this refers to losses in the field, such as unripe, overripe, insect or animal damage, etc. However, the article ignores the fact that many of the ones that are capable of being sold are never sold.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    Why would they ignore that, but include losses in the field? Without more information, I assume the "not capable of being sold" number includes unsold units too.
    - ViViDboarder 5y ago
      It’s possible, but doesn’t seem that way to me. That explicitly mention field damage and so forth but don’t mention unsold pumpkins.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Is there a different type of pumpkin for pumpkin puree? Or could they not be used as animal feed? And why can't you sell the seeds? The article quotes ~$100/1k seeds. That's $0.10 per seed. There are ~250 seeds per pumpkin - that's $25 per pumpkin. What am I missing?
    - Isamu 5y ago
      The small “sugar pumpkins” are generally used for canning. I think those are harvested with much less waste.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rp1 5y ago
      I doubt farmers would buy seeds for $100 / 1k seeds after the first season unless harvested seeds were not viable for planting or if the seeds were some type of specialized hybrid whose license prevented farmers from replanting their own seeds. Both possibilities would exclude selling the seeds for profit.
    - lathyrus_long 5y ago
      As to the seeds, a reputable vendor isn't just starting with any random fruit. Even for an open-pollinated variety, you want large separation distances from other varieties to avoid unwanted cross-pollination, potentially miles. You can also grow indoors, but that's more expensive and requires hand-pollination or introduced pollinators. You also need more careful artificial selection (roguing), to avoid long-term degradation of the genetics. For an F1 hybrid you need to do all this work to maintain each of the pure lines, and then also do the cross. Once you have the fruit, the seed needs to be separated, dried, perhaps tested for viral, bacterial, or fungal disease, perhaps treated with fungicide, and tested for germination. Of course a random pumpkin seed will grow with some probability, and the resulting plant will bear some kind of pumpkin. But the cost of high-quality seed is a very small share of the total cost of growing a pumpkin, so it's not a good place to cut corners. ETA: And the article notes explicitly that those seeds were hybrids. For emphasis, saving seeds from hybrids may or may not be legally permissible, depending on the patent status and any contracts signed, but with very few exceptions it doesn't work--the genetics aren't stable, and the F2 doesn't reliably have the same desirable traits as the F1.
beauzero 5y ago
That's why you have pigs. In the South (USA) pumpkin patches, corn mazes, and apple farms are only profitable with weekend day treks sold to urban/subdivision bound parents looking to get their kids outside. Pumpkins sold in Aldi's cost about $5 and we have paid as much as $60 for a similar pumpkin picked out by one of our kids. It gets us all out of the house and helps local farms.

paulcole 5y ago

I like how the article takes a hard turn from statistics: > Americans are expected to spend a record $10B+ on Halloween items in 2021, up from $8B last year — and pumpkins are a big player: Among the 65% of Americans celebrating Halloween this year, 44% (~94m people) plan to carve one. Straight to vague generalities: > While pumpkins can readily be found at most grocery stores, many folks turn to a patch to procure their autumnal canvas. It's like the person writing the article went in wanting to write about pumpkin patches but pumpkin patches aren't as common as they hoped so they plowed ahead anyway.

guerrilla 5y ago
Or the person just wanted to write about pumpkin patches, did that, and getting statistics on them was impossible considering how informal they are.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Feels like the statistics of how many people buy pumpkins at pumpkin patches could be important to an article titled the economics of pumpkin patches.
tomcooks 5y ago
Or that's how clickbait articles work
- detaro 5y ago
  How is the article clickbait? What did you expect based on the headline that you didn't get?
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Seriously. It's called "The economics of pumpkin patches," not "10 weird things you didn't know about pumpkins," and it literally discusses the economics of pumpkin patches with actual data. "Clickbait" now means "an article that sounds interesting to me."

monkeydust 5y ago

I went to a patch with the kids over the weekend here in UK. It was fun but when it got time to pay we joined a long queue with others having our pumpkins in a wheel barrow. When we got to the front we had to match our pumpkins to a template based on size (cost from 50p to £10) and then a cashier would tally up the total. I got chatting to the owner whilst waiting and he was open to a more tech smarter way to pay to avoid the queues. Anyone have ideas on how to do this, ideally using existing tech mashed together in a low/no code way? So flow would be ... - Move your barrow under a camera. - It would take a picture and through image recognition identify and classify pumpkins based on size. - This would be pushed to cashier with total. - Maybe where confidence level on classification was low it would prompt human intervention. To me weighing the barrow would be another, perhaps better, solution but the farmer wasnt keen on this and ran out of time to dig deeper!

itronitron 5y ago
If each pumpkin was passed down a conveyor belt in a single file line then it's diameter could be easily measured with an array of light sensors aimed vertically which could be used to set the price in the checkout system. Different customer's orders could be separated by a board that spanned the full width of the sensor array, which would stop the conveyor until it was removed.
david38 5y ago
Weight is the simplest by far. 50, Otherwise, build a box, and the smallest box that fit the pumpkin determines its size.
- odyssey7 5y ago
  I wonder if they run into issues selling by weight. Customers are usually paying more for the visual size, not however much water a particular item has in it. Does the weight increase linearly with size? If it’s especially hollow, probably not, while an especially large and hollow pumpkin may be uncommon and should be sold for a high price. Edit: I guess a better question would be, can you predict desirable carving qualities and visual size accurately as a function of pumpkin weight?

madiator 5y ago

I have mixed feelings about Halloween. On the one hand, it has a great social aspects to it: people get together for carving, there are parties, and kids have so much fun. But the environmental and health sides of it mindboggling. We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away; we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the landfill; and we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown (which is probably better than eating them).

syedkarim 5y ago
Can’t a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?
- madiator 5y ago
  People buy a lot of stuff during Christmas, but they get used. EDIT: I think so.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    If I had to guess, probably 80% of the stuff I've received over the years as Christmas gifts ends up getting used very little and then unceremoniously put on a shelf or in the trash. And that may be a generous estimate.
  - jonhohle 5y ago
    We let our kids wear their costumes for play the rest of the year. They get worn more in a few play sessions than on Halloween. Also, roasted pumpkin seeds are easy, healthy, and delicious. I wonder if after growing, harvesting, shipping, etc. a Halloween pumpkin is carbon negative.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Christmas so far outranks Halloween in consumer spending, I can't imagine anyone worrying much about the paltry 10B we will spend in 2021 on Halloween. Christmas will be 100x bigger.
5y ago

ashtonkem 5y ago

The farm we go to rotates which field is used as their season pumpkin patch on a year by year basis. We wondered if there was some crop rotation benefit to doing that, like maybe pumpkins fix nitrogen so they’re a good intermittent crop between other nitrogen depleting species.

ImprovedSilence 5y ago
Pumpkin is a type of squash. Squash, bean, and corn is the “three sisters” so it makes sense those other ones could be rotated in.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Three things (from my experience at our little market garden farm): Cucurbits (squashes, gourds, pumpkins, zuchinis, etc.) are heavy feeders. They use a lot of nitrogen, require fairly rich soil. So they're typical grown in recently amended soil. So growing them multiple years in a row in the same spot has some challenges. They attract quite a few pests (fungal and insect). But those pests tend to be specific to cucurbits (or Cucurbitaceae, including melons, etc.). So it's a good idea to rotate them out so that overwintering pests in the plot don't have a free snack the next year. Finally, they make a good crop to plant at the beginning of a rotation because they grow quickly and cover the ground, blocking the sun and drowning out many weeds. So a good way to bring new land into production or to get some perennial weeds out of a plot that you want to use for something else the next year.

dougSF70 5y ago

To be honest, it's a once a year event hence their popularity. A line (queue) comes with the experience. No need for tech / AI assisted solutions? Eyeball the size is the fastest method and people who go to pumpkin patches are happy to pay a premium.

jdkee 5y ago

The linked article cites ~770 tons of pumpkins. But the source the article cites 13,751 thousands of cwt. A cwt is 100 pounds, so the total production is ~1.37 billion pounds or 687,500 tons. How can we trust the rest of the calculations in this article if the data is so far off? See https://www.statista.com/statistics/192975/us-pumpkin-production-since-2001/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192975/us-pumpkin-produc...