Picking pumpkins is a popular fall activity, but it has become increasingly challenging for farms to offer this experience each year.
Sally Cybulski is part of one of the two families who use the land of County Line Farm during the fall season.
“We had a lot of issues with the pumpkins this year. Mainly, we had floods. It floods every year, but this year the flood brought weeds along with it, and those weeds just grew faster than the pumpkins and stopped them from getting sunlight,” Cybulski said.
This isn’t something unique to County Line Farm and is affecting farms across Missouri.
The extreme heat experienced this year, combined with rainfall and extreme drought, has made the pumpkin harvest unusually bad. The wet spring caused the pumpkins to be planted later than usual, and in turn this meant less pollinator activity.
“We also had issues with deer this year eating the baby pumpkins,” Cybulski said.
The drought this summer encouraged deer and groundhogs to attack other pumpkin farms as well. Fortunately, farms have been experiencing a normal amount of foot traffic despite these setbacks.
“We normally grow warty giant orange and white pumpkins, but we couldn’t this year. We just decided to plow them under and import pumpkins instead. We import pumpkins every year anyway; we import all of our specialty pumpkins that are smaller or gourds,” Cybulski said
While it is cheaper for farms to grow their own pumpkins, it is risky and they generally end up losing money due to loss of produce. This is something many farms in the Springfield area have experienced, causing importing pumpkins to be a cheaper risk free alternative.
Whether this new trend of having a bad harvest is permanent or not, farms have started to have to change their ways to fit in with this new unpredictable weather.
