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165 i Seven j PullingUpaPigSty toPutinaPumpkinPatch The Changing Nature of American Rural Economies, 1946 to the Present R eintroduced after World War II, the Circleville Pumpkin Show in Ohio now attracts 300,000 people over a four-day period at the end of every October. The festival features more than 100,000 pounds of pumpkins on display, a pumpkin pie contest, a 500pound pumpkin pie, a giant-pumpkin competition, a pumpkin-decorating contest, and a Miss Pumpkin and Little Miss Pumpkin contest. Vendors sell pumpkin-inspired novelties such as pens, hats, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and artworks. Doughnuts, waffles, ice cream, soups, cakes, even hamburgers are all made with pumpkin. In no small way, the town of Circleville , population 13,700, celebrates the vegetable.1 Hundreds of other pumpkin festivals take place throughout the country during the month of October. Vying for the title of pumpkin capital of the world are Morton, Illinois (pop. 16,209); Half Moon Bay, California (pop. 12,586); Keene, New Hampshire (pop. 22,395); and other small towns that put on annual festivals in honor of “the vaunted orange orb,” as one promoter called it.2 Roadside stands and pick-your-own (PYO) pumpkin farms line the roads leading out to these towns. The Arata Pumpkin Farm is now one of fifteen in and around Half Moon Bay that cater to San­ Francisco–area residents.3 Unlike the Aratas’ market, which began in the 1930s, most of them got their start in the 1970s and 1980s. Farms such as these have grown into tourist destinations in their own right by offering visitors not only local fall produce but also rural attractions designed to fulfill the most romantic fantasies of life on an American farm. 166 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch For many rural communities, the pumpkin is at once a catalyst for change and a sign of tradition. It aids local development while symbolizing an unchanging way of life. “We’re maintaining our small-town identity. We have Starbucks, and a Gap has come in. We need something to hold onto,” a resident of Chagrin Falls, Ohio (pop. 3,641), said about the pumpkin roll that has taken place on Main Street since the 1980s.4 Pumpkins have helped communities both survive economically and hang onto a rural sense of place. It is remarkable to hear festival organizers and farmers talk about the pumpkin as an embodiment of their values and as a tool for community building. Yet people give no hint that they are talking about an object of nature, much less a farm crop. As Bob Marsh, owner of Bob’s Pumpkin Farm near Half Moon Bay, told a reporter without irony, “It’s a people thing.”5 Nancy Sporborg , who founded the Keene Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire in 1991, explained, “What makes the pumpkin festival special, what makes The Circleville Pumpkin Show, Circleville, Ohio, October 1999. The show is one of hundreds of pumpkin festivals across the country that have helped rural communities survive and hold onto a rural sense of place. Photo: Cindy Ott. Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 167 it magic, is all of you [participants]. Every single pumpkin has meaning; it’s amazing.”6 People’s ideas of nature are multifaceted, and these ideas can reshape the world in unexpected ways that defy purely economic explanations. While Americans’ ideas about and uses for pumpkins have altered the fruit itself, the widespread desire for pumpkins is actually helping to revitalize the very small family farms with which Americans have long identified this iconic harvest symbol. The pumpkin’s biology, its meanings, and the market together encourage the growing of pumpkins by small-scale producers for local consumers. The history of the pumpkin counters the common assumptions that romantic agrarian fables and imagery have little to do with actual agriculture practices and that small-scale farmers and small rural towns are anachronisms in the modern-day United States. Farmers and rural communities have relied on this old crop, and on the stories people have told about it, to become viable economic enterprises in the twenty-first century. The establishment of most small-town pumpkin festivals seems to defy logic. The Circleville Pumpkin Show’s reemergence was not a sign of an agricultural renaissance or the reopening of the local canning factory but a decision by a group of merchants to rejuvenate the town. When the local agricultural society abandoned the pumpkin show to establish an agricultural fair on grounds outside of town, nine businessmen formed the nonprofit organization Pumpkin Show, Inc., whose profits were to be distributed for the betterment of Circleville citizens. As the links between the town and local agriculture grew more distant, town residents used the pumpkin to maintain a connection to the land and the agrarian way of life. Even though Eureka, Illinois, was a center of production for an array of vegetables and grains, the pumpkin became the town’s mascot when local leaders decided to dedicate an annual celebration to it in 1939. The festival moved to nearby Morton in 1966, when pumpkin processing was transferred to the plant there. Holding a pumpkin festival at Morton might appear to make sense because of the factory’s relocation, but the Caterpillar Tractor Company, the tractor and industrial equipment manufacturer , was actually the largest employer in town and by far overshadowed Libby’s contribution to the local economy. Even today, the Nestlé-­ Libby’s plant, the most productive one in the country, is not the largest business 168 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch in Morton. The Libby’s plant employs only around 30 full-time employees and 400 to 450 seasonal workers during packing season, from August to October. In contrast, Caterpillar has a permanent staff of 1,600 people.7 Although the pumpkin is not the most significant business in town, it certainly surpasses tractors as the source of Morton residents’ identity and inspiration. As Mike Badgerow, past executive director of the Morton Chamber of Commerce, told a Peoria, Illinois, newspaper, “The pumpkin has become an icon and visual calling card for Morton.”8 One has only to drive through the town to see the evidence—in local shop names, such as Pumpkin Patch Gift Shop and Pumpkin Packing and Shipping; in the town logo, a field pumpkin; and in the annual pumpkin festival, which recruits 1,500 local volunteers and hosts 60,000 to 80,000 visitors a year.9 Around Half Moon Bay, California, farmers have grown pumpkins since the nineteenth century. But it was not local farmers who began the town’s Art and Pumpkin Festival in 1971; it was the town’s Main Street Committee for Beautification. The committee initiated the festival to raise money for downtown restoration projects, such as planting trees and erecting streetlights along Main Street. Rather than local pumpkin production ’s fueling the town’s economy, the festival generates the pumpkin business in and around Half Moon Bay with the tourists it brings in from nearby San Francisco. Barnesville, Ohio; Keene, New Hampshire; and Spring Hope, North Carolina all stake a claim to being the pumpkin capital of the world, but with less historical legitimacy than Circleville, Morton, and Half Moon Bay.10 Spring Hope (pop. 1,306) held the first “National Pumpkin Festival” in 1971, even though tobacco, cotton, sweet potatoes, and cucumbers were the local cash crops. Pumpkins do not grow well in the Spring Hope area because of its hot climate and loamy soil. The pumpkin, explained Vera Edwards, a resident since 1948, was never a central actor in the town’s economy or history. Rather, the town initiated the festival as an excuse for local residents to get together and as a means of drawing visitors from the surrounding areas to boost the economy.11 The plan worked—the pumpkin festival brings people in by the thousands. Most pumpkin festivals are downtown street fairs with booths, games, and parades. The Morton Pumpkin Festival begins with the ceremonial cutting of a pumpkin vine.12 The early years at Circle­ ville—the oldest continuous festival, and one with a legitimate historical connection to Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 169 pumpkins via the now-defunct canning factory—included horse shows, horse racing, high-wire acts, “girlie shows,” and wild creatures.13 Nowadays , the festivals offer much tamer family fun. At Circleville, the first morning kicks off with a ten-kilometer Pumpkin Run followed by a pumpkin-pancake breakfast. Giant pumpkin weigh-ins, pumpkin cooking contests, pumpkin tosses, pumpkin pie eating, and pumpkin carving contests all invite local participation and entertain onlookers. Emphasizing a sense of camaraderie among participants, one reviewer noted, “And when neighbors square off in the contests and competitions, you can bet it’s pride—not prize money—that’s at stake.”14 In Spring Hope, the parade is the festival highlight. Local politicians, school classes, and civic groups wave from homemade floats, fire trucks, and sedans. Farmers on tractors used to be the most common entries, but businessmen in sports cars have replaced them over the years.15 Miss Pumpkin Queen and Little Miss Pumpkin Queen, winners of the beauty pageants, usually receive the greatest fanfare along the parade route. The visual and thematic center of the Circleville festival is a tower of pumpkins weighing 250,000 pounds and measuring more than twenty feet high. Ten square blocks surrounding the tower are lined with booths offering almost every imaginable pumpkin-infused object and culinary delight. Visitors meander, often elbow to elbow, pausing to see the giant pumpkin pie or to taste pumpkin concoctions ranging from burgers to muffins and from ice cream to chili. Many go home clutching a festival t-shirt, a pumpkin basket, a painting, or a glass ornament from among the vast assortment of pumpkin-inspired souvenirs. In some communities, front-yard decoration contests stretch the festivities into the surrounding neighborhoods. Spring Hope residents, for example, are encouraged to decorate their yards in order to make the town look prettier and more civic-minded.16 In Morton, each yard must include at least one pumpkin, and residents appear to have no trouble complying with the decree. At the 2000 Spring Hope festival, the winner constructed a cornucopia the size of a child’s clubhouse, with dozens of pumpkins and gourds pouring forth. For sheer number of pumpkins per square foot of town space, no place compares to Keene, New Hampshire. From 1991 to 2005, the town held the Guinness Book of World Records title for the most jack-o’-lanterns assembled in one place.17 The weekend before Halloween, residents and visitors 170 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch register their carved pumpkins at an official booth. In the center of town, jack-o’-lanterns sit on dozens of shelves and platforms and on four 40-foot towers, and cover a good deal of open ground as well. Although the Keene Pumpkin Festival offers a parade and plenty of food and crafts, the main attraction is strolling the streets and admiring the jack-o’-lanterns. Carvings range from the traditional triangle-eyed face to elaborate depictions of haunted Halloween scenes. One year, a man carved a marriage proposal into a set of pumpkins and set it on one of the pumpkin towers, to his girlfriend’s surprise and, luckily, delight. Organizers counted 600 jack-o’-lanterns in 1991, the first year of the festival . By 2009 the number had reached 29,762.18 (Boston beat Keene out of “Pumpkin Festival 2001,” Keene, New Hampshire, festival brochure, 2001. Keene’s festival features the display of thousands of jack-o’-lanterns carved and contributed by attendees. Photo: Al Braden. Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 171 the world record with a display of 30,128 pumpkins in 2006.)19 After dark, everywhere one looks is awash in glimmering, flickering jack-o’-lanterns. It is a picture of visual pageantry and community effort—all composed with fleshy pumpkins. “Community is basically the raison d’être for the Pumpkin Festival,” said one of the Half Moon Bay organizers succinctly.20 In Keene, the level of community spirit can literally be measured in pumpkins, a fact that organizers are quick to acknowledge. “The magic of the Pumpkin Festival is in its participatory nature,” stated the 2001 festival program. “It is an event everyone helps create by contributing their hand-carved masterpieces . Together—as friends, neighbors, Pumpkin Festival regulars and first-time visitors—we witness the power of community in the awe-inspiring sight of thousands of jack-o’-lanterns shimmering in the night. One cannot help but feel a sense of wonder stirred by the simple act of carving a pumpkin and adding it to so many others.”21 Keene and the other small towns have made decorating with pumpkins an overt act of community building. By attracting visitors to small-town streets, pumpkin festivals have become economic boosters. Rural populations had experienced decline in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. But the construction of interstate highways that bypassed main streets in the 1960s, postwar suburbanization, and the exodus of the farming population and tax base because of the 1980s farm crisis had many small rural towns barely limping into the last decades of the century.22 Pumpkin festivals provided the towns with a renewed sense of vitality by improving their local economies and assisting local charities. “The Pumpkin Festival is our fund raiser. We use the money to help pay for sidewalks, restrooms at the park, Christmas decorations, and more,” explained Carol James, acting president of the Spring Hope Chamber of Commerce in 2000.23 In Half Moon Bay, money raised from the more than 250,000 annual visitors goes to urban improvement projects and local nonprofit organizations . From its inception in 1970 until 2010, the festival raised more than $2 million.24 “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.25 Furthermore, the Half Moon Bay festival permits other nonprofit organizations to operate concessions to raise money on their own. The Circle­ ville Pumpkin Show’s charter stipulates that the festival’s 172 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch revenue must be used for the town’s benefit. As the festival sold more than 23,000 pumpkin pies and 100,000 pumpkin doughnuts in 1991, the pumpkin can be quite “fruitful” for the town’s coffers.26 Besides solidifying a sense of community and financing local improvements , the festivals are a means of attracting tourists as well as new residents . Reporting on Pumpkintown, in northwestern South Carolina, one journalist observed, “You would completely miss it if it weren’t for the blinking light and grocery store. [Because of its pumpkin festival] the community becomes famous one day each year.”27 More than thirty thousand people attend the annual festival, which turns this small crossroads into a regional hub.28 Farther north, the “World Championship Punkin Chunkin” puts “slower lower Delaware” on center stage. There, tens of thousands of spectators have gathered every year since 1986 to watch competitors launch pumpkins from all sorts of hand-built, nonexplosive contraptions , including catapults, air cannons, and giant slings.29 (The world record, set in 2008, was 4,483.51 feet, nearly a mile.) With a declining population base, Spring Hope organizers count on their pumpkin festival to lure people and money from the affluent nearby Raleigh-Durham area.30 But why not simply hold the “Spring Hope Festival” or the “Half Moon Bay Festival”? Why make it a pumpkin festival? In most cases, the reason has little to do with the town’s economic history. Few small towns have any greater claim to pumpkindom than the urban centers from which visitors flock. Furthermore, the rise in pumpkin festivals in the late twentieth century coincided with a decline in the number of people working in agriculture. In 1935 there were 6.8 million farms in the United States; by 2002 the number had dropped to 2.1 million.31 Since the creation of the National Pumpkin Festival in Spring Hope, “Agriculture in North Carolina has gone from mules to computers, from small family farms to agribusiness operations,” wrote one journalist.32 “We have a generation of people here now who do not know anything about agriculture,” noted a candidate for North Carolina’s commissioner of agriculture.33 In Circleville , most of the surrounding county land is still farmland, but the trend is toward fewer and larger farms.34 Even in Morton, parts manufacturing , not pumpkin processing, is the main industry. Although NestléLibby ’s promotes and supports the festival, it is not the beige, oval, Libby’s Select pumpkin that appears in the town’s logo but the bright orange field pumpkin. Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 173 For most of these towns, the pumpkin festival has become the largest event of the year, replacing the annual Fourth of July celebration and expressing many of the same patriotic ideas. “I like to think that the real reason for the growth and the glory of the Show is the fact that it is firmly rooted in American tradition and history,” explained one Circleville promoter . “Harvest festivals go back into antiquity. Pumpkins, squash and corn were growing in this county long before the first settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts. The first families to settle on these farms and fields came here to cultivate the fertile soil. So it is only natural that we should celebrate the harvest and rejoice in the bounty that is ours.”35 A newspaper article about the history of the Morton event tried to explain why the town chose the pumpkin from among the large array of crops grown and processed in the region and over the products of other prominent local industries: “Early settlers of this area brought with them seeds of the old ‘Thanksgiving’ pumpkin. Finding a favorable environment in the soil and climate of the community, this original strain of pumpkinprosperedandhasbeengrownherebyfamilieseversince.”36 The author fuses the natural and cultural history of the pumpkin to create the region’s origin myth. He links the community to the pumpkin served at the first Thanksgiving, thereby connecting Morton to Plymouth Plantation and the Pilgrims, who are enshrined as paragons of American virtue and democratic values. The “original strain of pumpkin” represents not just a rootstock but a cultural stock. And the fact that the Pilgrims might not have served pumpkin at their immortalized Thanksgiving feast gets buried under deep layers of myth and wistful imaginings. Like many other tourist attractions, pumpkin festivals are easy targets for cynicism and scrutiny.37 One can claim that they are mere fabrications based on old clichés and have little to do with the past and present realities of rural America. One could argue that the pumpkin festival is just another pseudo-experience, an all-too-common example of crass commercialism that profits from sentimentality. Still, critics who deride such Morton, Illinois, Chamber of Commerce logo, 2000. 174 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch festivals as “Mickey Mouse history” should not ignore the renewed prosperity these events offer to small towns or dismiss the sense of community that a pumpkin festival engenders.38 Many civil leaders established these festivals when their towns were teetering on extinction. In places like Circleville, as links between the town and local agriculture grew more distant, residents maintained a symbolic connection to the land and to the past agrarian way of life. What is remarkable is that they turned to the pumpkin to do so. For generations, Americans have invested deep meaning in a vegetable that is practically worthless in every quantifiable way. By using the pumpkin to maintain a sense of rural identity, small towns renewed their livelihoods and feelings of relevance and attracted many eager visitors in the process. When driving out to these celebrations from nearby urban centers, we might commonly pass roadside stands and more elaborate pick-your-own farms. Since the 1980s, thousands of family farms have opened their gates to the public for the month of October and turned portions of their property into agrarian wonderlands where visitors reenact playful renditions of old-time harvest activities, including, especially, picking a pumpkin. The purpose of the farm festivals, however, is hardly to teach the practicalities of farm work. Echoing the sentiments of small-town pumpkin festival boosters, farm festival organizers imagine their pumpkin farms as places that offer a piece of American heritage and inculcate good agrarian values. “Farmer John” Muller, owner of Farmer John’s Pumpkins and Daylight Nursery outside Half Moon Bay, told a reporter about his pumpkin crop, “It’s not only something we grow to sell, but something we grow to bring happiness.”39 In all their touristy and carnivalesque splendor, modern-day pumpkin patches are nevertheless places where many Americans experience traditionsthattiethemtothepast ,tonature,andtoeachotherandtherebyhelp sustain the very cornerstone of their longings—small family farms. The term family farm is deceiving and requires some explanation. Although the romantic image looks like a small place with a red barn, livestock, and diverse crops, even the largest farms in the country are usually family owned and operated. According to the USDA, a family farm is “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives , as well as farms with hired managers.”40 In 2007, 98 percent of all Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 175 American farms were family farms.41 The issue today is that the largest farms (those earning more than $250,000 annually and usually measuring more than 500 acres) make up only 10 percent of farms yet generate 75 percent of the revenue. In turn, small to medium-size farms (those earning less than $250,000 annually and usually measuring 499 or fewer acres)— the ones that Americans celebrate—make up 90 percent of American farms but earn only 25 percent of the agricultural profits.42 Because small operations cannot compete in output or efficiency, people who stay on the land seldom make a living solely from agriculture but instead have to rely on off-farm income to maintain their farming operations. They have also developed alternative markets as a means of survival. Like the start of the Aratas’ pumpkin farm market, the creation of Holsapple’s Pumpkin Patch in Greenup, Illinois, in the early 1980s was spurred when passers-by were enticed by a pile of pumpkins. The stopping -and-shopping led to customers walking out to the fields and picking the produce themselves. “Although we planned to wholesale all the Cox Farms Pumpkin Festival, Centreville, Virginia, October 2000. The Cox family farm is one of thousands of small family farms that convert some of their land into pumpkin wonderlands every autumn. Photo: Cindy Ott. 176 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch pumpkins to grocery stores, people came to the farm and asked if they could buy some. [That’s how] the Pumpkin Patch was born,” explained Sheila Holsapple, who, with her husband, Terry, owns the five-hundredacre Illinois farm. A few carloads of people visiting the Holsapple farm in the 1980s grew to fifteen thousand visitors by the autumn of 1994.43 In the early eighties, the Holsapples and other small family farmers had strong motivations to seek out new economic opportunities. The same forces that encouraged many farmers to expand operations in the 1970s propelled their downfall in the next decade. Middling farms were hit hardest, although they, along with small farms (measuring 1 to 49 acres), had been declining in number for decades.44 The early 1970s had been a time of great prosperity for American farmers because of changing international markets and domestic farm policies. Russia’s decision to import grain from abroad created a huge new market for American farmers but also raised food prices at home. In order to fulfill the demand from abroad and to make food cheaper domestically, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, replaced the checks-and-balances policy established under the New Deal, which sought to regulate prices through production and supply controls, with a policy of planting as much as possible , “from fencerow to fencerow.” Federal farm subsidies for the top five commodity crops—corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice—were supposed to make up for any drop in prices due to increased production. Few farmers worried about falling prices at the time; most were more concerned about being able to expand fast enough. Many farmers, relying on the promise of soaring land values and commodity prices, borrowed money to increase their acreage and to buy the extra equipment needed to work it. What happened instead was that the Russians turned to other sources for grain, and the bottom dropped out of the market, leaving many farmers with debts they could not repay. Increasing the acreage under production had lowered commodity prices for big buyers, and now put farmers in a constant struggle to make ends meet. Images of farmers auctioning off their land and equipment and stories of others who committed suicide filled the nightly news. The farmers’ plight drew widespread popular sympathy, including from celebrities such as singer Willie Nelson, who organized Farm Aid concerts that drew hundreds of thousands of fans and supporters. The farm crisis exacerbated an existing problem, that of Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 177 the long-decreasing viability of small to mid-size family farms in a world of expanding industrial agriculture. Selling a sense of rural nostalgia as well as locally grown produce, many farmers, like the Holsapples, transformed portions of their farms into tourist destinations. By offering fun attractions along with quality fruits and vegetables, they encouraged customers to make the trip out to the country. As one farmer commented, “The direct farm retailer today has gone from ‘growing the crop’ to ‘marketing the farm and the farm experience.’”45 Al and Bart Bussell, differentiating their modest, 160-acre California fruit and vegetable farm from the corporate farms that surrounded it, referred to their mode of operation as “entertainment farming ,” because they were not only producing and selling goods but also providing recreation to their customers.46 Noting the one area in agriculture in which small farms could best corporate farms, an agricultural specialist at the National Center for Appropriate Technology said, “Unlike the mega-hog facility or a corn/soybean operation producing bulk commodities , the small farm can recreate an earlier, simpler, human-scale vision of farming.”47 Pick-your-own farms, as this form of farm direct marketing is known, developed a little later than roadside stands but from similar motivations .48 One Illinois farmer who launched a PYO operation in the 1960s observed, “The pick your own method of retailing allows us to set our own price and to be independent of the wholesale market fluctuations, thus improving our profit margins after harvest and giving us an immediate return on our crops.”49 Between 1982 and 1992, the total number of farms selling directly to consumers rose by 40 percent, and at least half of them had annual incomes of less than $50,000, indicating that they were small-scale operations.50 Describing the value of agri-tourism as a market niche for small-scale farmers, one analyst wrote, “Producers enjoy higher returns that have allowed them to stay in farming. Because it is initially less capital intensive, farm direct marketing provides opportunities for new farmers and smaller-scale producers with limited resources.”51 As Long Island farmer Edward Latham attested, “A lot of neighbors who didn’t go retail ended up selling out to developers.”52 Like roadside stands, pick-your-own operations rely heavily on large population centers for their customer base and usually need to be located within about an hour’s drive of a city and its surrounding suburbs. Most 178 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch PYO operations began with strawberry picking, which remains extremely popular.53 But although there is some logic to driving dozens of miles and enduring backbreaking work for succulently sweet, fresh-picked strawberries , why make similar efforts for a vegetable that you are probably not going to eat? The pumpkin, we know, provides intangible rewards that no other fruit or vegetable bestows. Strawberry farms might offer urbanites great fruit and the allure of a rural experience, but rows of strawberries hardly compare with the pomp and circumstance of the pumpkin patch. In order to make the farm “an inviting place to relax, play, and enjoy,” farmers revamp a portion of their property to create an idyllic, rustic farmscape, like a scene out of a Winslow Homer painting or a contemporary children’s book.54 “You can buy pumpkins at the store,” explained a farmer, “but the farm atmosphere attracts people. We are trying to keep our farm as ‘farmy’ as possible and not commercialize it.”55 One farmer referred to his pumpkin stand as “a low tech theme park.”56 Several farmers noted that they planted corn merely for the added “ambiance” or “atmosphere.”57 Another referred to the requisite “farm critters” at the festivals as “added attractions,” since their main function on the farm was for entertainment, not milk or meat.58 The transformation of the Holsapples ’ place epitomizes the shift from traditional farming to entertainment enterprise. “To add 200 much-needed parking spaces,” explained a reporter, “the Holsapples ripped up their hog feeding floor. ‘Although they’re equally hard to handle sometimes, the cars filled with customers make us more money in four weeks than year-round hogs,’ stated Terry [Holsapple].”59 Presumably, the same financial motivation spurred Eric Cox and Gina Richard, co-owners of Cox Farms in Centreville, Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., to convert some of their forty acres of fertile farmland into a parking lot. Their pumpkin festival began in 1983 and would soon become one of the most popular fall tourist attractions in the D.C. area. In the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas alone, seventy-one pumpkin festivals or roadside stands were open for business in October 2002. After enduring a lengthy traffic jam, each carload of visitors to Cox Farms in 2010 turned onto a dusty hillside on the property to park alongside hundreds of other vehicles. Paying $9 to $15 per person to enter the festival grounds, depending on whether they visited on a weekday or a weekend, visitors then sized up their options Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 179 from a long list of pumpkin farm activities hand-painted on a wooden sign board. Would it be a visit with “Farmer Jack”? Pet the milk cow? A horse-drawn wagon ride? A tour of the haystack maze? And of course all visitors had a chance to pick their own pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. The scene was “farmy” indeed, and more reminiscent of Currier and Ives scenes than of most modern agricultural operations. About sixty miles away, David Heisler has raised pumpkins on fifteen acres of his family’s land in Montgomery Country, Maryland, since 1988. His pumpkin stand is situated at a crossroads that leads to Sugarloaf Mountain, the closest mountain recreation area to Washington, D.C., which is thirty miles to the south. The property lies at the northern tip of the county, an area that was once a thriving agricultural community but has increasingly been divided up into housing developments and office parks. Like those who visit Cox Farms, most of Heisler’s customers drive at least twenty miles to buy his pumpkins. For adult urban dwellers, the pilgrimage resonates with a sense of nostalgia for a past picturesque way of life as well as for similar past family outings. Heisler fulfills their Hand-painted wooden signs at the Cox Farms Pumpkin Festival, Centreville, Virginia, October 2000. The signs post all the festival events, from hayrides to pumpkin picking, which let visitors reenact playful renditions of old-time harvest activities. Photo: Cindy Ott. 180 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch fantasies by hanging bunches of Indian corn from the porch rafters and filling his yard with bundles of cornstalks and wooden crates of apples, squashes, and gourds. Hundreds of pumpkins cover the yard, front steps, and porch. Rather than focus on the real-life drudgery of field labor, farmers create a “fun farm,” where, for an entry fee, visitors can relax and enjoy games based loosely on farming chores.60 These are chores, however, that one is more apt to see in turn-of-the-century romantic genre paintings than in current state agricultural extension reports. Whether at Chantilly Farms Pumpkinland in Virginia, Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska, Behmer’s Pumpkin Fantasyland in Illinois, or any of the thousands of other pumpkin festivals held across the country in the early 2000s, one was likely to find a hayride, a pick-your-own pumpkin patch, nature displays, pony rides, country music, farm animals, haystacks, scarecrow building, and corn or hay-bale mazes.61 Tractors and wagons are the only vehicles allowed in the “Back Forty” at Vollmer Farm in North Carolina, a place where visitors tour “Grandpa ’s Animal Barnyard,” “Grandma’s Pond,” and the “Punkin Patch Park” playground. At Vala’s Pumpkin Patch, old farm equipment and buildings and an old schoolhouse on the property reinforce a sense of nostalgia for the “old days,” when life was supposedly simpler and in closer rhythm with the natural world.62 Piling into a wooden wagon pulled by horses or an old tractor provides both a ride out to a pumpkin field and a trip back in time. At Butler’s Orchard in Germantown, Maryland, the trip takes riders over undulating hillsides and open fields and alongside picturesque hedgerows and tree lines that obscure nearby housing developments. The goods offered for sale add to the natural, homespun character of the place. Pumpkin and Halloween crafts, honey, homemade fudge, preserves and jams, fresh apples and apple cider, homemade baked goods, Indian corn and gourds, and colorful varieties of squashes and pumpkins reinforce the site’s old-fashioned, rural atmosphere. The lack of packaging , the hand-painted signs, and the farmer’s relatives serving as checkout clerks make the place seem a world apart from everyday retail experiences. Farmer Deirdre Jones, owner of Windy Acres Pumpkin Patch near Alicel, Oregon, told a reporter, “People do not come out here just to buy a pumpkin , they come to share a family experience—one that cannot be found in a grocery store parking lot, digging through a bin.”63 Even though some of Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 181 these goods are produced elsewhere, customers get a sense that they are supporting a local family farm and thereby preserving a beloved agrarian landscape, not just purchasing merchandise. “Despite all the attractions,” said Terry Holsapple, “the biggest draw is what fascinated onlookers years ago—pumpkins.”64 For most of America ’s past, picking a pumpkin meant little more than hefting a pitchfork out in the solitude of the back forty. It was a lot of work with few enumerable rewards. In the late twentieth century, it evolved into a form of family entertainment. Participants actually pay to pick the vegetable, and they hardly get their hands dirty. Pumpkins are spread over almost every surface of the festive landscapes, knee-deep in some places. The artifice at farm festivals is easy to spot, but it is also easy to ignore. Pumpkins are often cleaned, set upright, and arranged in pleasing displays. In pick-yourown patches, pumpkins are seldom even attached to a vine, much less still in the patch in which they actually grew. Customers nevertheless seem pleased to be able to cross a field to find a pumpkin. Although growers try to construct the perfect fruit, variety is still important as each person searches for a distinctive look for his or her pumpkin. Pumpkins are sold by weight, by size, or, in the case of Renick’s Farm outside Columbus, Ohio, by the number customers can carry in their arms. Bins of sugar pumpkins are available for those who actually want to cook pumpkin, but many visitors are just looking for one that represents an “old-fashioned” age, as a customer of Heisler’s put it.65 People come equipped with cameras more frequently than with recipes in mind. Several of Heisler’s customers return year after year to take pictures of their children with the pumpkins. Returning to the same patch gives the trip a sense of personal nostalgia. Some customers at the Heisler stand have returned to buy their pumpkins there every year since it first opened in 1988. Family trips to the country to pick a pumpkin are now a part of childhood lore. Pumpkin Day, Pumpkin Night (1999), by Anne Rockwell, is one of many children’s tales about a family’s annual excursion to the patch to pick a pumpkin for Halloween.66 Departing from their suburban home, the family drives out to a pumpkin farm market in the country. The iconic images that illustrate the story include the scenic rural landscape, the rustic farm stand, and the piles of pumpkins. Pumpkin Day, Pumpkin Night is marketed as a “timeless story of a treasured childhood tradition,” even 182 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch though such annual excursions date back just a few generations. One Maryland farmer called going to the annual pumpkin festival “a rite of passage.”67 Families with children are the target audience for farm festivals, which helps carry on the sense of tradition. Hay-bale slides and animal petting barns, along with more typical fair offerings such as face painting, are designed for the ten-and-under crowd. Small Oz and Jack-Be-Little pumpkins are for sale for children to hold and to paint. On weekdays, many farms offer tours to schoolchildren to show them how a farm operates. Along with lectures on planting and harvesting, some tours offer attractions such as a “Storybook Barn” and displays of antiquated farm tools.68 The lessons have little practical application for these mostly urban and suburban children. Instead, they reinforce the cultural significance of the family farm in American history and consciousness. The focus is less on contemporary agricultural issues, such as chemical inputs, government subsidies, and genetic engineering, than on how farmers and nature work in harmony for the benefit of all. Renick’s Family Pumpkin Patch, Ashville, Ohio, October 2000. The artifice at farm festivals like this one is easy to spot, but it is also easy to ignore. Photo: Cindy Ott. Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 183 “It’s neat to know that I’m part of families’ special memories,” said Deirdre Jones. “People seem to need this place and the magic that happens here. I’ve never seen anyone get in an argument, I just see families having fun together.”69 The idea of finding harmony in a pumpkin patch perhaps reflects contemporary anxieties about the loss of a sense of community as the American population has become more transient, as well as feelings of dislocation from the natural world. For organizers and participants, the pumpkin patch is a place to regain those connections. Farmer Jim Vala commented, “We are happy that we are bringing families together. I think we are doing something good for the community.”70 A rare controversy at northern Virginia’s Cox Farms Pumpkin Festival in the autumn of 2000 offers a good example of the ways Americans instill the pumpkin patch with a sense of virtue. That year, some people attacked the farm for flying rainbow flags, insignias of gay pride, above its pumpkin patch. The owners said they had not intended for the flag to have political overtones. They flew it for fun, they said, but they did not mind the association with gay rights. Co-owner Gina Richard proclaimed , “This is a pumpkin patch. This is not a place where prejudice and bigoted actions take place. All families are welcome here.”71 In the children’s tale Pumpkins (1992), author Mary Lyn Ray infuses the pumpkin patch with similar moral values.72 The pumpkin’s age-old reputation as a noncommodity crop seems to have been the inspiration for this morality play, in which Ray portrays the pumpkin field as a bulwark against modernization and greed. An old man, his age signifying history and timeless values, wants to save a field from development. “The man talked to the field, and the field said that it would help,” says the narrator . “They considered growing Christmas trees, which the man could sell in the city. But trees grow slowly. There wasn’t time. . . . Then the man thought of pumpkins.” A successful harvest of pumpkins provides the man with enough money to purchase the field and save it from the bulldozers . The story concludes: “The man might have planted more pumpkins . He had kept one back for seeds. Pumpkins would make him rich. But he had everything he needed. So he decided to give the seeds away. Because somewhere, someone might love another field [that] pumpkins could save.” Stories such as this one apply old sentiments about the humble yet virtuous pumpkin to modern anxieties about community, overdevelopment, 184 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch and loss of open spaces. The author represents the pumpkin patch as an idyllic agrarian landscape that is a source of American values that can privilege community service over personal greed. Perhaps that is what John Muller meant when he said, “When the kids visit Farmer John, they learn what a farm is like. And what pumpkins are really all about.”73 So neatly have the stories about pumpkins and pumpkin farming intertwined with actual farms and farmers that some people find it difficult to draw a distinction between fact and fiction. “The idea of being outdoors, the animals, the nature—except for reading about it in storybooks or seeing pictures, this isn’t something the kids would get to experience,” said a mother of two who visited the Cottonwood Farms pumpkin festival outside Chicago in the fall of 2005.74 Yet, ironically, these agrarian fairytale lands have now become as much fact as fantasy. In its own modest yet significant way, Americans’ celebration of the pumpkin has in many places reconfigured the business of agriculture and the character of rural areas. Pulling back the curtain, Wizard of Oz–style, on the hard economic and production realities behind these fanciful festivals reveals what the pumpkin—this iconic piece of American family farm heritage—has meant to actual American farmers. Central Illinois, where some of the largest pumpkin farms in the country are located in the early twenty-first century, is a good place to start. Dave Newhauser has been raising pumpkins for Libby’s canning factory on his family farm near Eureka, Illinois, for about as long as he can remember.75 He was born on the farm, which was deeded to his family under the Homestead Act in the late nineteenth century. He followed in the footsteps of his father and contracted with Libby’s to grow about a hundred acres of pumpkins annually. In the 1960s he moved to Morton, Illinois, after the company hired him as field supervisor for neighboring farms that also produced pumpkins for the plant. Eventually, he became plant manager, although he continued to grow pumpkins on his own farm even after his retirement. Pumpkins are in Newhauser’s blood, and images of them covered his office walls, desktop, and windowsills at the time I interviewed him in 2000. Newhauser made a great spokesperson and symbol for all that pumpkin farm operations are supposed to be, and Libby’s took full advantage of that. Nestlé, the parent company, cultivated the down-home image of the pumpkin by profiling Newhauser in its literature and by emphasizing his family’s long connection to the vegetable. Rather than illustrating its Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 185 2000 annual report with the most advanced and up-to-date equipment used to harvest and process pumpkins, the cover featured Newhauser, who was wielding a small pocketknife in the middle of a pumpkin field. The company markets the crop as an old-fashioned business, even to its shareholders. And judging by Newhauser’s family history, the company’s glossy, picturesque illusions contain a fair bit of truth. Although farmers in every state grow pumpkins, Illinois is the number one pumpkin producer, with 13,679 acres and nearly 219,000 tons harvested in 2007.76 Farmers in the state produce 95 percent of all processing pumpkins (mainly Dickinson and Libby’s Select) for canneries nationwide .77 Almost all those farmers work for Libby’s, but some also grow ornamental varieties for fresh market sales. In 1984, with prices falling for their staple crops—corn and soybeans—Newhauser’s neighbors the Ackermans began to grow 33 acres (700 tons) of Libby’s Select processing pumpkins for the factory and around 10 acres of ornamentals on their 300-acre farm. A few years later they started an annual pumpkin festival , complete with a petting zoo and a store selling goods produced in the state. In 2000, they were featured in a local newspaper article, “Ackerman Family Makes Pumpkins Full-Time Job.”78 Another top pumpkin-producing state is Pennsylvania, which in 2007 had more farms that grew pumpkins than any other state—1,690 (Illinois listed 502 farms).79 About one-quarter of the pumpkins produced in Pennsylvania are raised in Lancaster County, home of the modest-sized, 78-acre-average Amish and Mennonite family farms.80 Each farm grew about four and a half acres of pumpkins, 95 percent of which were ornamentals grown for fresh market sales. The region that the USDA designates the Lower South is the smallest-producing region, with well under 50 farms and fewer than 200 acres planted in pumpkins in each of its six states.81 Even here, though, the low production rate hardly equates with southerners’ lack of interest in pumpkins. The region hosts hundreds of annual pumpkin festivals that rely on imported pumpkins to supplement what they can produce locally. The yield for ornamental varieties is smaller than that for processing pumpkins because no blemished fruit can go to market. Although you cannot find records about it in the agricultural census, farmers have also established creative markets for these stragglers unfit for retail as animal feed. Cattle, hogs, and even some wild beasts get their fair share of 186 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch leftovers after the top-grade pumpkins are picked over for human consumption . Robert Lewis, of Lewis Orchards in Dickerson, Maryland, averages an 85-percent yield for his ornamental pumpkin crop and sells the remaining 15 percent, which he considers seconds, to a local cattle farmer.82 A New Mexico grower sells his damaged pumpkins to a neighboring rancher, whose cattle graze the pumpkin fields at a cost of $6 a head per month until all the fruit is consumed.83 In New Jersey, hunters’ demand for smashed, damaged, or half-rotten pumpkins to use as deer bait has created a steady new market for growers. Hunters may pay prices comparable to what festival-goers pay, leading some farmers to make as much money on culled pumpkins as from fresh market sales.84 Even more exotic are the gorillas and elephants that get their share. For the last several years, farmers near Washington, D.C., have donated their remaining Halloween pumpkins to the National Zoo for the animals’ eating and entertainment. According to zoo officials, the animals love to “kick, squash, and eat their fill of these seasonal treats.”85 The day I visited Dave Newhauser in mid-October 2000, the Libby’s plant operations were nearing their seasonal shutdown, having churned out one can of pumpkin after another, twenty-four hours a day, since midAugust . Within minutes of pulling out of the factory parking lot, with Newhauser as my tour guide, I was beyond the streets of Morton and surrounded by farmland. This was corporate agriculture, pumpkin style. In the world of pumpkin production, Libby’s farms are some of the highesttech operations, but it is difficult to recognize them as such. Fields of small to medium-size family farms, averaging 330 acres, such as Newhauser’s, are separated by wooden houses perched amid protective groves of trees.86 In the fall, when the vines have rotted, a sea of pumpkins is clearly visible in the fields. During most of the growing season they are hidden beneath a canopy of leaves. On the particular farm we visited, the pumpkins had already been windrowed into straight lines. The long, low piles of muddy beige vegetables stretched the length of a sixty-acre patch, ready to be picked up by a Libby’s-invented pumpkin loader and taken to the factory ten miles away. All the Libby’s pumpkins are raised in fields that are in direct and close proximity to the plant. The company does not own the land itself but contracts acreage and labor from local farmers. Instead of constituting one megafarm, the pumpkin fields are dispersed on approximately 100-acre Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 187 lots on these 300-acre family farms. (Statewide, the average field size for processing pumpkins is 105 acres, and for ornamentals, 9 acres, for a combined average of 31 acres.)87 In the 2010 growing season, Libby’s had 5,000 to 6,000 acres of pumpkins in production, which it doled out among dozens of growers in four counties near the Morton plant.88 Libby’s attempted to expand operations into southern Illinois in the late 1960s, and more recently tried growing and processing pumpkins in Gridley, California.89 Neither expansion paid off, so the company returned to its original operations around Morton, thereby keeping its farming operations small-scale and local. A dismal 2009 harvest due to heavy rains has prompted the company again to consider planting farther afield.90 Illinois’s 31-acre pumpkin farms are five times larger than the national average of 6.1 acres.91 The total number of pumpkins harvested in the United States has jumped dramatically in the last forty years, but the average number of acres per farm has remained steady since the 1970s. (Some farms, of course, plant just a couple of acres, and others plant hundreds .) For most of the twentieth century, production was static, with approximately the same number of farms growing pumpkins in 1974 as in 1899.92 In 1939, the low point in acreage since the government began keeping records, 2,194 farms grew just 5,975 acres, an average of 2.7 acres per farm.93 The industry publication The Packer: Produce Availability and Merchandizing Guide, established in 1893, did not even include pumpkins in its yearly reports until 1986. By 1987, more than twice as many farms (6,921) raised almost double the acreage of pumpkins (40,652) than thirteen years before.94 Between 1997 and 2007, the number of farms and acreage more than doubled again, to 15,088 farms harvesting 92,955 acres nationwide.95 Although nearly five times as many farms produce more than four times as many pumpkins than thirty-five years ago, one still has to put these numbers in perspective. In 2007, 432,077 farms harvested more than 92 million acres of corn, and 279,110 farms harvested almost 64 million acres of soybeans, which suggests that pumpkin production is minuscule by commercial agriculture standards.96 Even the largest producers, such as Frey Farms of Keenes, Illinois, which plants 750 acres of pumpkins on its 1,200-acre farm, and the Torrey family farm in upstate New York, with 250-acre fields within a 10,000-acre operation, would be lost in the sea of corn fields that stretches across the Midwest.97 In 2007, California , the state that produces by far the largest quantity of fresh fruits 188 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch and vegetables and is the sixth largest pumpkin producer, registered 359 farms with a total of 5,106 acres under cultivation, an average of 14.2 acres of pumpkins per farm.98 In terms of overall vegetable production, the percentage of American farms that cultivate pumpkins is rather high, at 22 percent in 2007, yet the percentage of acreage devoted to pumpkins among all acreage harvested is a mere 0.02.99 What all the statistics tells us is that pumpkin farms are not getting larger; instead, more and more small farmers are adding a few acres of pumpkins to their production. In other words, pumpkin farming, unlike the farming of many other crops, has not become concentrated in the hands of a few large producers over the last fifty years but is scattered among small operations like those around Morton.100 Consequently, the pumpkin harvest festivals are not merely cultural fantasies but represent a significant economic strategy for small family farms. Having gained a sense of what a pumpkin farm looks like, we can get down in the dirt and see how they operate. Production in Morton begins in mid-February, when the company contracts with local farmers. Libby’s offers farmers bids based on price per ton. According to pumpkin farmer John Ackerman, the company usually sets a price a little higher than he could get for growing corn or soybeans.101 In order to have the pumpkins ready by August, the crop is planted in late April, or perhaps in May in regions with colder climes or at farm operations geared toward October sales of ornamental pumpkins. Libby’s provides the farmers with seeds. Elsewhere, most farmers purchase seeds from catalogs. Farmers no longer plant pumpkins in hills of three to four seeds, as they did in the past. Instead, growers of both ornamental and processing pumpkins use a mechanized corn planter to drill holes and drop seeds, and then cover the holes. To compensate for the threat of frost and other dangers, Libby’s farmers plant around nine thousand seeds per acre and then thin the plants to about four thousand seedlings after they are about six inches tall. The seeds are the cheapest component of production, which makes it easy and feasible to overplant. The farmers are responsible for managing the crop until harvest, including renting beehives to pollinate the flowers and applying pesticides and herbicides.102 About half the fields are dry farmed, meaning that they are not irrigated. The standard policy among pumpkin farmers is to plant a particular field only one out of every four years to prevent weeds, disease, and nutrient deficiencies. Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 189 Because of the meandering nature of the vines, no mechanized hoeing equipment can be used on any patch of pumpkins after the early part of the season. To prevent weed growth, farmers must hand-hoe the ground, plant it with a cover crop, cover it with plastic, or spray herbicides on it. In the cover crop, or no-till, method, farmers cultivate a grass such as rye and then mow it down to create a straw or mat barrier against weeds. According to one Maryland farmer, the cover crop also improves the pumpkins’ appearance by protecting them from “dirt splash,” which bleaches out their orange color.103 The similarities between farming pumpkins for canning and farming pumpkins for jack-o’-lanterns end at harvest time. In Morton, to harvest processing pumpkins, the contracting growers step out of the operation, and Libby’s hires other farmers to run the company-owned harvest equipment . The men who harvest the crop are mostly retired farmers who, according to the one I met, enjoy the part-time seasonal work. Libby’s uses migrant labor only for factory work; agricultural production remains in the hands of locals. Harvesting is no longer backbreaking labor, because all aspects of processing pumpkins are now mechanized. Innovations were late in coming, however. Until 1955, farmers sliced pumpkins from the vine with handheld blades—a task now performed by two pieces of equipment. The first machine cuts the pumpkins from the vines and puts them in rows. This machine could not be used on ornamental pumpkins because it can inflict nicks, cuts, and other cosmetic problems. The second piece of equipment is the Libby’s-invented pumpkin loader, which looks like a tractor with a large conveyor belt up one side. The loader picks up the pumpkins and tosses them into an open trailer attached to the back of a semi-truck that drives alongside the loader in the field. The pace of the harvest is obviously much faster than when the task had to be performed by hand. Three pumpkin loaders working at once can load a ton of pumpkins in twenty minutes.104 When the trailer is full, the truck driver takes the load down the road to Morton. There, an automated lift tilts the trailer up and pours the pumpkins onto conveyor belts that lead right into the factory, where the processing begins. In contrast, harvesting ornamental pumpkins is very labor intensive and still almost completely unmechanized to ensure quality. It is backbreaking work. Each pumpkin is hand-cut from the vine with pruning loopers. After being left to cure in the field for a week or so to harden the 190 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch skin and improve the color, they are piled manually, one by one, in rows for loading onto trucks or bins, or they are left in the field for pick-yourown operations. Farmers sell pumpkins directly to consumers at their own markets or PYO operations; to retailers ranging from small local businesses and nonprofit organizations that host harvest festivals to large-scale chains with national distribution; and to wholesale distributors or brokers. For sales to brokers and large retail chains, farmers usually hand-sort ornamental pumpkins by size and shape, because those customers want pumpkins to be uniform. Roadside sellers prefer a variety of shapes and sizes to accommodate buyers’ individual preferences. Before workers hand-load ornamental pumpkins into cardboard bins or directly onto trucks, they either hose them down along a conveyor belt or, more likely, handwash them with a damp towel.105 How picky farmers are about the appearance of their ornamental pumpkins and how delicately growers treat them greatly affect the yield per acre.106 Brokers either contract with farmers at the beginning of the season or purchase pumpkins directly from farmers or at auction houses when the season ends. Robert Lewis, a Maryland wholesale and retail grower, sells the vast majority of his pumpkins to local markets and neighboring farms with retail businesses, but he reported that a Chicago broker had bought pumpkins from him one year to sell in New En­ gland. Torrey Farms, in New York State, ships to Florida, where the climate prevents local farmers from fulfilling demand.107 Frey Farms sells to Wal-Mart for national distribution, and the Arata Farm in California distributes pumpkins to Rite Aid stores.108 Jack-o’-lantern pumpkins are heavy, making transportation costs per unit almost prohibitive and cross-country shipments rare.109 “No trucker in his right mind wants to haul pumpkins,” said a Toledo, Ohio, broker.110 Shipping them long distance is expensive and risky because of the high value placed on the vegetable’s appearance. Transport greatly increases the likelihood of bruises and nicks, not to mention the loss of a stem—a death knell for any ornamental pumpkin. Don Nivens, who has a farm near Moore, South Carolina, stated that the best way to sell pumpkins is through PYO operations because the pumpkins he buys from other farmers often arrive neglected and rotten.111 By and large, long-distance transactions occur only during shortages.112 A website of pumpkin Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 191 wholesalers and truckers lists only one company out of twenty-eight that transports pumpkins nationwide.113 More common are regional sellers such as McCurdy’s Pumpkin Patch, which ships pumpkins no more than seventy-five miles from its farm in Cass County, Iowa; farmers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who draw buyers in the mid-Atlantic region to their local produce auction in Leola; and the Patterson Farm in Sunderland , Massachusetts, which has been supplying pumpkins to farm stands and stores in New En­ gland since 1983.114 While transportation is one practical explanation for why pumpkin farming is geared toward local and modest-size family farms, another is the vegetable’s very short period of demand. Tomatoes, lettuce, and zucchini , not to mention apples and berries, are hot commodities throughout the year, but who wants a pumpkin in January, May, or August? According to The Packer, not many people. Charts of annual pumpkin shipments published by the guide are mostly blank, except for the slender columns of numbers in September, October, and November.115 Although producers and retailers attempt to expand the buying season into September, the sale of fresh pumpkins for jack-o’-lanterns is limited mainly to the four weeks of October. Sales for ornamental pumpkins , except for the few that go to feed animals, come to a screeching halt on October 31, Halloween, and sales of canned pumpkin plummet after Thanksgiving weekend. During the 2009 pumpkin shortage, one­ grocer remarked, “We [usually] order so much . . . that we can’t get rid of it after the Thanksgiving season.”116 The narrow period of demand for pumpkins affirms the crop’s symbolic import but also suggests constraints on its value as a commodity. Growers’ sales are, in the words of Dave Newhauser, “lucrative but limited”—lucrative because of high demand but limited because they last for only a short period.117 A Maryland farmer explained that he considered it too risky to expand his acreage because the “parameters of the market” were too inflexible.118 If he did not find buyers or if the crop did not begin to turn orange by the end of September, then his investment was lost. The size of the local market also limits the pumpkin business. A community or city can support only so many pumpkin farm markets, especially because of the crop’s limited time of use. In the 1990s, many farmers got into the business, increasing supply and causing prices to drop in the early 2000s. Annual harvest variations due to climatic conditions also 192 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch affect crop value and prices.119 Because the 2009 season was an especially bad one, sellers across the country had to search far and wide and pay top dollar for pumpkins. The nature of the plant itself also contributes to the widespread propagation of pumpkins at small-scale farms across the country. Whereas the pumpkin’s bulkiness is a liability for long-haul transport, its climatic versatility and ease of production enable growers to plant it just about anywhere, so many small farms are capable of fulfilling local demand. Farmers from Maine to Alabama and from Maryland to California can produce pumpkins at the time consumers desire them most. When a northern Virginia pumpkin farmer told his grandmother he was growing pumpkins for sale, she questioned his sanity. “Who’d in their right mind pay for pumpkins?” she asked incredulously.120 Lots of people, as it turns out. Pumpkin farmers might be quaint, but they are part of a multimillion dollar business. The dollar value of wholesale ornamental and processing pumpkins across the country was more than $250 million in 2007.121 Maureen Torrey, of Torrey Farms, said with a chuckle and not a little bewilderment that “one big pumpkin is worth more than two thousand pounds of cabbage.”122 For many growers, pumpkin farming started as a side business to supplement farm income and prolong the working season but then grew to be a major and pivotal source of revenue. “We got into pumpkin growing through the back door,” said Don Nivens, owner of the forty-acre Nivens Apple Farm in northern South Carolina. The first year, Nivens planted a quarter acre of pumpkins. He then increased the acreage over the years to four acres, and by 1996 he had seven acres under cultivation. For Nivens, growing ornamental pumpkins was a means of protecting himself against the loss of his main crop, apples. The family hosts an annual pumpkin festival as well. He relies “on pumpkins to save his financial skin,” explained a Small Farm Today reporter.123 Tim and Jan Vala’s pumpkin field on their farm near Gretna, Nebraska, began as a half-acre patch in 1983. Within ten years it had grown to 43 acres, and as of 2010 the couple was cultivating pumpkins on 55 acres of their 152-acre farm, where they also host an annual festival.124 Both the Holsapple family and the McAfee family—the latter fifthgeneration farmers who operate County Line Orchard in Hoart, Illinois— estimate that half their annual farm income derives from pumpkins and Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 193 their annual festival.125 Many small farmers cannot survive on farming alone and depend on nonfarm income of some sort to allow them to keep their farm operations going. In general, farmers who grow processing pumpkins for factories have more acreage but reap smaller profits per acre than farmers who grow ornamentals for wholesale or local markets. For example, in 2005, farmers earned just 3 cents per pound for pumpkins in Illinois, which devoted 70 percent of production to processing pumpkins, whereas New Jersey and Virginia farmers, who devoted 100 percent and 96 percent of their production, respectively, to ornamental pumpkins, brought in 29 cents and 11 cents per pound at wholesale in 2009.126 These averages do not take into account special business arrangements like the one Libby’s set up with local farmers to pay them just over the price per acre for commodity crops of corn and soybeans. When asked about the profitability of her enterprise, Diedre Jones said, “It is a little difficult to put a price on memories, fun and family togetherness.”127 Behind the romance, the hard facts are that pumpkins bring in thousands of dollars a year to farmers who grow them. “A significant minority of farmers are really cashing in on pumpkin crops. It is getting to be a fairly big business,” stated the Massachusetts commissioner of food and agriculture in 1999.128 The exact dollar value of pumpkins varies by federal reporting agency, state, weather, type of pumpkin harvested, yield, and the market. Yet all sources indicate their profitability for the small and medium-size farms that grow them. According to the USDA, the value of the crop for the six highest producing states in 2007 was $123,519,000, which converts to an average of $2,691 per acre before production and harvest costs are deducted. The USDA estimates that these costs can run as high as $2,000 per acre, so farms net an average of $691 per acre.129 For farmers in the top six states, who average 10 acres apiece in pumpkins, that amounts to a net profit of $6,910 annually, while farmers who grow the national average of 6.1 acres clear $4,215. These sums might be modest, but they make up a good portion of small-farm net income, which, according to the USDA, averages $25,000.130 The national totals reflect the most conservative profit estimates. State-by-state statistics paint an even more optimistic, though varied, picture . In Illinois in 2005, 12,900 pumpkin farmers earned a gross profit of $16,049,000, or an average of $37,320 per farm ($1,204 per acre).131 In Texas 194 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch in 2002, 38 farmers brought in $2,400,000, for an average of $27,360 per farm ($772 per acre).132 New Hampshire farmers in 2007 grossed 40 cents per pound for wholesale ornamental pumpkins, or $10,353 total for each of the 225 farms, which harvested on average 2.81 acres of pumpkins ($3,685 per acre).133 Another testament to the pumpkin’s economic worth is the Maryland agricultural department’s recommendation in the 1980s that farmers grow pumpkins to compensate for declining tobacco propagation in the southern part of the state.134 These production figures do not account for direct farm marketers who have fall harvest festivals and stands, which reap the highest profits. Besides earning up to $20 for an entry fee at some establishments, these farmers can charge retail prices of 35 to 50 cents per pound for jack-o’-lantern pumpkins, which amounts to $15 to $20 for a single pumpkin or a gross sum of $14,000 to $20,000 per acre.135 The U.S. Agricultural Census does not record statistics for gourds and mini-pumpkins, such as Jack-BeLittles , because the USDA considers them to be nonfood items—but they certainly add to farmers’ sales.136 According to Maureen Torrey, ninety acres of minis bring better returns than three hundred acres of peas.137 Between 2006 and 2010, minis on average brought in 25 cents a pound to wholesalers and about $1 apiece to retailers.138 These calculations omit as an income source all the ornamental and edible squashes that have gained popularity on the pumpkin’s coattails, as well as the jams, ciders, apples, and other products sold at pumpkin patches and stands. Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton, declared in 2000, “The rising popularity of urban pumpkin patches and fall festivals has helped spur demand for pumpkins and increased income for some farmers.”139 Paul Siegel’s Cottonwood Farms, in Crest Hill, Illinois , near Chicago, started a pumpkin festival in 1990 that attracts more than 30,000 visitors every year and earns Siegel three times more than his 400 acres of corn, soybeans, and grains.140 Jan and Tim Vala had more than 80,000 people purchase about 250 tons of pumpkins from their Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska in the fall of 1993, with average purchases of about $20 per family.141 David Heisler’s fall stand in suburban Washington , D.C., earns him more for pumpkins than he receives from local grocery stores for string beans, corn, and peppers.142 These farmers take on additional costs of running the markets, such as insurance, labor, and toilet and parking facilities, but the financial benefits far outweigh the Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 195 liabilities. Pumpkins allow farmers to continue farming, as opposed to doing something else. The local food movement, driven by the desire to improve both the health of agricultural land and the food it produces, has inspired a whole new appreciation of the small farm at the turn of the twentyfirst century.143 With American agricultural policies that have increased farm production and government subsidies for commodity crops since the 1970s, more food is being manufactured from corn and soybeans. Ready-made entrees, fast food meals, sugary drinks, and savory treats are higher in calories yet less expensive than many whole foods, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, which are not supported by government subsidies . That is what makes products like jack-o’-lantern pumpkin cookie dough possible. Concerned citizens worry about the environmental effects of largescale production of mono-crops, including increased use of artificial inputsandpetroleum-basedproductstoproduce,manufacture,andtransport these foods to distant markets. They worry about the health consequences of Americans’ ever-increasing waistlines, which have coincided with the greater availability of cheap, high-calorie foods. Activists such as Michael Pollan have encouraged consumers to avoid the inner aisles of grocery stores, where processed foods line the shelves, and instead to shop on the outer peripheries, where fresh meats and produce are on display. First Lady Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn and started the program “Let’s Move” to help improve children’s eating habits.144 Farmers markets, food co-ops, urban gardens, and consumer-supported agriculture programs have proliferated alongside pumpkin stands with consumers’ increased demand for local and organic foods and their desire to know the stories and people behind the food itself. Some of these initiatives were born out of Italian Carlo Petrini’s slow food movement, founded in the 1980s. Yet in the global context , of equal concern is not just what to feed but how to feed the world’s fast-multiplying population, which the United Nations expects to peak at 9.2 billion in 2075.145 The pumpkin fulfills many Americans’ desire to maintain connections to the mythical family farm of lore, and it has rejuvenated many small farms in the process. It also plays into these current food challenges by reminding reformers that food is more than something to eat. Many 196 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch reformers interpret the U.S. health crisis as a problem of diet and nutrition ; however, imagining food as simply vitamins and calories misses the deep meanings that people invest in what they eat. As most of us know, proselytizing about the nutritional attributes of food has little chance of success in changing people’s long-term eating habits. Almost anyone who has been on a diet is well aware of that. Eating is a complex cultural act, and appetites are stirred by many cultural factors beyond health and nutrition—including family, ethnic, regional, and national traditions—as well as by time and financial constraints. Changing food habits, whether getting people to eat more of one food or less of another, depends on understanding the cultural meanings that people invest in food. Modest American pumpkin farms will not solve the world’s food problems, but their success proves that seemingly esoteric beliefs and romantic ideas about food are as important to people’s food choices as health, nutrition, or even taste. Not far from Heisler’s pumpkin stand is the Pipe Creek Farm, now a national historic landmark. In the 1950s, this inconspicuous Maryland pumpkin patch was the scene of international intrigue after Whittaker Chambers hid a trove of microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin there. The film allegedly linked Alger Hiss to Soviet espionage.146 The pumpkin patch, it seems, was considered one of the least likely places someone would look for evidence of high crimes against the American people. It was not only physically remote from the centers of power and culture but also ideologically removed. The pumpkin field, a place both unassuming and yet noble, was the last place anyone would expect to uncover evidence of treason. The story of the “pumpkin papers,” as the incident came to be known, embodies both the prominence of the pumpkin in popular American culture and the evolution of the pumpkin’s functions and meanings. Whereas the pumpkin patch was once considered a cultural backwater, over time its primitive status has made it a sacred place of American virtue. Few people probably consider that the site of this famous episode in American international relations was anything very special, but a pumpkin patch is no ordinary place. Consider, too, a 1978 photograph by Joel Sternfeld of McLean’s Farm Market in northern Virginia. At first glance, the center of drama might seem to be an old farmhouse’s rooftop fire. The viewer’s eye travels from a grassy foreground littered with smashed Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch = 197 and scattered orange pumpkins past an abandoned farm stand to the orange blaze erupting from the house in the distance. From a hook-andladder truck, firefighters battle the flames. The eye travels back down the picture frame to the pile of pumpkins nestled next to the rustic market building. Curiously, a lone firefighter intently selects some pumpkins while his colleagues are occupied with the house fire. The tension in the photograph emanates from the man’s preoccupation with the pumpkins rather than the fire. What the photographer seems to be contemplating is Americans’ “burning” fascination with the vegetable. The matching orange hues of the pumpkins, the blaze, and the fireman’s uniform convey a synergy between the pumpkin and the man, and the intensity of the Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944), “McLean’s Farm Market, December 1978,” digital C-print, 42 by 52 1/2 inches. In this photograph, Sternfeld captured a lone fireman intently selecting pumpkins from a farm market while his colleagues are occupied with the burning farmhouse behind him. Courtesy Joel Sternfeld and Luhring Augustine, New York. 198 < Pulling Up a Pig sty to Put in a Pumpkin Patch attraction. Like Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch, McLean’s Farm Market is an unassuming landscape hiding a deep and compelling story. The man’s simple act of picking a pumpkin from a pumpkin patch opens up a rich and complicated history about how Americans have found themselves in nature and, in the process, have changed both nature and themselves. ...

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