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As Halloween approaches, pumpkin farmers are in a particularly scary situation as they face mass crop failures following extreme weather conditions.
Heavy rain and increasingly unpredictable climate conditions have left the UK’s pumpkin growers with smaller – or in some cases barely any – pumpkins this year.
Jonathan Hewitt is one of the many farmers warning consumers to adjust their expectations after seeing a sharp downturn in his yield.
He says he says this is the worst outcome his 10-acre pumpkin patch on the Dunham Massey estate in Altrincham has seen “in all his years”, with almost all of his crops failing.
“In all my years, this was absolutely the worst one for pumpkins. We were hoping for 40,000, but we’ve seen about a 90 per cent failure rate,” he said.
“It’s off the scale harsh.”
He highlighted that a combination of wet weather and a surge of slugs exacerbated the already difficult growing conditions – a sentiment echoed by his colleague, Joe Hamer, a fifth-generation farmer from Shrewsbury.
While his pumpkins are ready for picking, he estimated that only 60-80 per cent of pick-your-own patches across the country will be open this year.
“If you could have written a book about how you’d not want the weather to be, it would have been the weather this year,” he said.
The winter of 2023/24 was the wettest on record in England in Wales, and followed the wettest 18 months on record for Britain since 1836. Recent data from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit predicted England is on course for one of its worst harvests on record as a result.
The lacklustre harvest comes as pumpkin farmers were hoping for a more fruitful year after last year’s yield also failed to impress.
Chad Stevens, who has been farming the 200-acre Horncastle Farm near Wakefield for the past decade, said the stark contrasts in weather have decimated this year’s pumpkin crop.
Last year the harvest was affected by heat, this year, it’s been heavy rain.
Mr Stevens said: “Of around 3,000 pumpkins planted last year, we only ended up with about 200. It was scorching for weeks. It didn’t rain, so they never got established.”
This year has been in stark contrast, he said: “It’s been the opposite end of the spectrum, with the ground so saturated in May that we could not get them in the ground when we wanted to. So we had to plant later.”
While this year’s crop is bigger, the pumpkins are often much smaller, with the largest of his crops measuring only eight inches across – significantly smaller than the 12-14 inches in previous harvests.
Professional pumpkin carver Jamie Jones said the quality of this year’s harvest has made him “feel like crying,” as he only has products “roughly two-thirds to half the size” he would typically expect.
“I honestly feel like crying,” said Mr Jones, who relies on beautiful, large pumpkins for his carving business. “Smaller pumpkins are more time-consuming to work with and much harder to carve.”
As farmers grapple with both immediate challenges and the long-term implications of climate change, Roger Harding, director of Round Our Way, an organisation that supports people impacted by weather extremes in the UK, urged politicians to make sure the UK is better prepared for new weather extremes brought by climate change.
He said: “An unpredictable pumpkin harvest may seem a small thing but it’s a big deal for many farmers and an example of how our increasingly unsettled weather is starting to have an impact on food prices and our traditions.”
