Pumpkin shortage hits Upper Valley
By Alina Gonzalez
Published on Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Poor weather this spring has led to a pumpkin shortage as Halloween nears.
Paul Huelskamp '06, who hails from Fresno, Calif. -- "the undisputed agricultural capital of the world," as he calls it -- never thought he would face the type of predicament he encountered while pumpkin shopping for Halloween this past weekend.Due to an extremely rainy planting season, many local farms were unable to produce more than a few decent sized pumpkins this year.
"I made a visit to both Co-ops in the Hanover area, and the only pumpkin I could find was a pathetic, fungus-covered gourd that in its best attempt resembled a half-deflated orange soccer ball," he said. "It was a disheartening situation at best, as my original intention was to stop at nothing short of carving an impression of the unholy Dark Lord himself atop the back of an angry, fire-breathing dragon, and instead I'll have to resort to smashing my ugly pumpkin on someone's doorstep on Tuesday."
Denise Hasson '09 echoed Huelskamp's disillusionment.
"The softball team went to my coach's house to carve pumpkins last week and she only had like 12 mini ones," Hasson said. "Halloween without a pumpkin is like a cookie without milk ... a travesty a kid should never have to endure."
Ray Sprague, whose family runs Edgewater Farm in Plainfield, N.H., explained the agricultural circumstances behind this year's shortage.
"Basically what happened is that last May and June we had record rainfall for those months back to back, and with this rain you get cyclical disease cycles so you have all kinds of bacteria and molds that come in," Sprague said. "When we went out to look at our pumpkins in the beginning of August, we saw that our field had molded and all of our pumpkins were just trashed. We usually get 10 to 20 bins of pumpkins and this September we got 12 pumpkins. Twelve good pumpkins."
Poverty Lane Orchards, a retailer that imports its pumpkins from local farms in Windsor, V.T., and Plainfield does not have a single pumpkin left for sale because their local suppliers were sold out.
"We had three last week. And now they are all gone," a Poverty Lane employee said.
Planters at the Dartmouth Organic Farm were only able to turn out a minimal number of pumpkins as well.
"We'll get requests from organizations looking for 50 to 100 pumpkins, and we really don't have those kinds of numbers," Scott Stokoe, the farm's manager, said.
Alex MacClellan, who runs a farm in Windsor said that the only places with a shortage of pumpkins are those places that make an effort to buy locally.
"If you see a retailer with a big display of pumpkins, those pumpkins probably came via the Boston wholesale market and probably traveled quite a distance from either Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Canada," he said.
For those lucky farmers whose pumpkin crops were not affected by the rainy spring, the relative lack of locally grown pumpkins has driven up the value of their harvests, Sprague said. A bin of pumpkins usually goes for around $80 to $100, but he said he has heard of some farms selling pumpkins for around $400 to $500 a bin this season.
"If you have pumpkins, it's a good year to have 'em," Sprague said.
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