The economics of pumpkin patches | Hacker News Reader

The economics of pumpkin patches

thehustle.co

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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.

But, the chart clearly showed that 50-75% of the pumpkins cannot be sold.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The small “sugar pumpkins” are generally used for canning. I think those are harvested with much less waste.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Weight is the simplest by far. 50,

Otherwise, build a box, and the smallest box that fit the pumpkin determines its size.

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?

FWIW: Selling by weight seems to be common (and quick) in Minnesota.

Take a "sample" of pumpkins, weigh them, have the humans write down their prices and fit a pumpkin weight -> price model. A pumpkin is sort of a hollow shell if you discount the weight of the goop inside, so the weight should increase with the square of the diameter.

Weight is beautifully simple, but the process of unloading 100lbs of pumpkin to be weighted & loading them back in your cart might be a significant driver of the queue latency.

Grocery stores pipeline the unloading & loading steps.

Just roll the wheelbarrow right over an in-floor scale! Subtract the wheelbarrow's own weight, which can be printed on the wheelbarrow itself. Or for something more high tech, put a QR code on the wheelbarrow and you can periodically update its empty weight in the database when it's empty and scan it at checkout.

This is basically how it works at my local landscaping store where they sell gravel by weight.

That wheel barrow is probably half full of water bottles, coats, and whatever other random crap the kids needed. Probably a kid in there too!

I’ve sold pumpkins on a farm before. It’s a social experience where you pay for the pumpkin “ticket” at the end.

Whole families dress up for the experience. People love being in a pumpkin patch and searching for their favorite pumpkin. They love doing it with their family. They enjoy the risk of wheeling them and guessing how much they weigh.

And the farm makes more money when they grow heavier pumpkins.

This isn’t an activity to be taken so seriously.

Scales and measurement aren’t really necessary. I could eyeball and wobble a pumpkin very quickly and give a fair price. But then I am having all the fun, not the customer.

Put the tech into making it a better experience!

Oh is that tractor pulling a wagon? Got to go!

Here is my thought process:

> - Move your barrow under a camera.

Minimum $5k, closer to $25k, to set physical hardware, network, queueing line and instructions

> - It would take a picture and through image recognition identify and classify pumpkins based on size.

$100k+ capex to get implemented model on hardware, sufficient training samples + training expertise, QA, etc. Ongoing opex for maintenance (sun, weather), model maintenance, and cloud infra / use

> - This would be pushed to cashier with total.

Customers would argue with cashier, much like self-checkout lines at big box stores.

> - Maybe where confidence level on classification was low it would prompt human intervention.

Confidence could be high on false positives/negatives.

-----------------------------

Overall, I like the idea of AI-assistive technology implementations. Are we to the point where it won't wreck the economics of a small operation?

@pumpkinman - IMO in regards to business viability it’s just as valuable to see someone’s process of how they came to the conclusion as the conclusion itself

Thanks for the support. I considered the @pumpkinman's complaint quite odd!

To address their primary note directly: I do indeed speak this way when reviewing details and considering hunches on viability. If someone only needs a conclusion then I give them one. Most people legitimately considering something, like creating an ML implementation (something I do all the time) and mapping to business feasibility, benefit by understanding the "why" of a conclusion. That by chance you do not personally benefit is not pertinent. If I have read your comment appropriately, I recommend adopting this interpersonal wisdom: https://xkcd.com/1053/

True that’s a steep one time cost for one patch, but then sell the process and tech to your competitors.

Or get a pumpkin size detector working as a phone app and load it on a cheap $150 android phone taped to a stick

A pumpkin size detector is also known as an eyeball.

Okay. You fund it, I'll build it.

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.

Since the demand is concentrated over such a short period I guess the simplest solution would be to have one price for all?

This would encourage people to shop early as they would get the pick of the crop - so to speak. Latecomers to the party would have less choice, obviously, but would still be incentivised to buy anyway since there are not that many alternative pathches to choose from in a given area.

The price could also be reduced as time goes by so the day before halloween you're almost certain to sell the most amount possible.

Pumpkins are an expiring good. To move as many as possible as quickly as possible while also collecting as high of a price as each person is able/willing to pay, it is best for the seller to offer many versions of the pumpkins at many price points.

Aka selling different styles of pumpkin at different price per weight. The seller can sell to people willing to pay more for various styles, and people willing to pay more for various sizes. And to people wanting to spend less, and everyone in between. Which is what already happens.

I would agree with you but, from my limited observation, there seems to be an awful lot of pumkins left over after halloween has been and gone. Maybe what already happens isn't the best way?

I have no idea. I generally assume markets with many participants that have existed for many years and with seemingly no regulations, are the way they are because various constraints of nature have tended towards that solution.

One would need to know what a typical amount of waste is and the cause of that waste to determine if there is too much waste and how to fix it. But I am guessing whatever waste there is now is a pretty optimal amount of waste unless there is some new development that reduces the volatility of producing pumpkins.

Farming in general is like that, since so many variables are outside of peoples’ control. You have to aim for extra even if you are not projecting to sell all of it, assuming the cost of making the extra is absorbable.

TBH, I think you over-complicate this.

1. Dry-weight scales are very common in produce/stores and extremely common in EU stores (I'm in Russia right now and it's de-facto the standard for most every store)

2. Get a few scales cause you can use them for all produce year around, and they easily earn their keep, and the upkeep is cheap

3. Pre-pick pumpkins under a certain threshold and sell at flat prices; this creates two sale levels: one for those who want a big pumpkin to mess with, one for those who just want a pumpkin to carve. The latter doesn't need to be heavily regulated, your workers can just eye-ball it and given the margins around Halloween you won't really lose out (probably such "eye-balling" will benefit the farm, not the consumer)

The technical solution here might eventually be more accurate, but it doesn't really benefit anyone. The conditions to make the camera detection work are wonky and you probably end up wasting more time making sane conditions for detection than you do just setting some limits.

Similarly, don't forget that too much tech, and it actually might __discourage__ people as they see the farm as non-authentic. The aesthetic of an organic "real" farm doesn't include a lot of high-tech in many people's minds, and you risk offending the wisdom of the masses by being "too technological". Granted, there's absolutely no difference in the end result, but consumers certainly thing differently about it (there's a reason a lot of people still prefer a human cashier to the touch-screen terminals at fast food restaurants, and it's not efficiency, that's for sure)

You could also pre-label any more exotic (type/size) pumpkins.

For that matter, you could pre-label everything outside of a "commodity" which you could segregate. But just weighing seems more straightforward than messing with boxes and seems like it would be a pretty good proxy.

Unload barrow on a checkout cage, top of checkout cage is a plank with holes on top with one hole for each size category (the bigger the more expensive)

Pumpkin falls on an Arduino controlled button, adds +1 on a price multiplier

All pumpkins get unloaded on a checkout wheelbarrow for customer to load on their car.

To open the cage and collect the checkout wheelbarrow you have to pay price is sum of multipliers times their respective base price.

Unsold loaded checkout wheelbarrows in cages can be pushed by staff at the beginning of the queue with a "pay with credit card and leave in 30 seconds" sign, at a 10% premium.

The way they solve this at a huge pumpkin patch out in Snohomish, WA (not Craven) is by having a member of staff walk down the line and tally up before people hit the register. They write the sizes and sum on a piece of paper, you give it to a cashier. Done. Lines went QUICK.

Low tech, works well.

The patch we went to had a loop with a string attached. Loop went over stem and they wound the string around the pumpkin. String had markings so they could tell how much to charge. Took all of 2 seconds per pumpkin.

I don't really want a teched out pumpkin patch.

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.

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-produc...

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.

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.

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.

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).

Can’t a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?

People buy a lot of stuff during Christmas, but they get used.

EDIT: I think so.

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.

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.

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.

They are renewable and compostable —both things are often not possible to achieve in other activities.

Those not used can actually be used for baking pumpkin pies —though probably slightly different from regular pie pumpkins, but good enough.

So all things considered, this should not even register vs things like other festivals where there are tons of trash left over.

> They are renewable and compostable —both things are often not possible to achieve in other activities.

I was thinking and wondering if all those 1000s of acres could be used to grow something else, which people could eat and not throw away. :)

But you make a great point. It is better that we carve pumpkins, which are compostable, than use some kind of non-compostable stuff.

People have more than enough food. Where there is a famine you find a government behind it.

Compostable but are they all composted? Where I live, yes; but in other areas they go inside a plastic bag to a landfill where the bag won’t break down for many many years.

> We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away;

As far as entertainment goes, carving a pumpkin and then letting it quickly compost away is relatively low impact.

You could always argue that the most environmentally friendly option is to do nothing at all and cause nothing to be produced or moved around, but that's hardly a realistic argument. Criticizing every activity that causes something to be consumed, no matter how renewable or compostable, is hardly productive.

Once the environmental arguments get to the point where we're criticizing people for carving a vegetable up but not eating it once per year, it gets hard for people to take seriously.

I hear you. I am not criticizing Halloween, since I take part in doing all of these. I did mention costumes going to landfill though, not just pumpkins.

What I mentioned doesn't have to be taken to extreme to say nothing should be produced and moved around! By that analogy, the only way to save the environment is to stop living.

How do we know what the environment wants? When we are saving it, it’s from our perspective. We are saving our environment. There are plenty of pests that don’t like what we’re up to.

We are important. :)

I suspect I do far more damage to myself and the environment with how I use computing equipment than I'll ever do on Halloween. It really depends on how you do Halloween.

> We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away

We roast the seeds of any pumpkins we carve and compost the remains. The ones we don't carve get turned into pumpkin pie. We get immense satisfaction from the planning, carving, and displaying of our Jack-o'-lanterns.

> we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the landfill

We tend not to buy the cheap costumes, but instead assemble our costumes from a combination of costume parts and real items. We have chests full of this stuff and even if we don't use a particular item again, our spooky entity-creations do. The stuff will only end up in the landfill if my inheritors throw them away.

> we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown (which is probably better than eating them).

I eat all the candy. I give myself permission to eat less-than-great from Halloween to New Years. If I start getting some chub, I work out a little extra. I even did this when I was a body builder (just don't tell any of my trainers).

*Edit: HN-specific markdown...

This is the kind of handwringing that makes me 100% sure climate change is going to wreck us in ways we can barely imagine right now.

Fixing humankind’s damage to the environment is going to take such sweeping societal changes that Halloween costumes and pumpkins shouldn’t even be a blip on our radar.

A time honored practice when carving pumpkins is to roast the seeds in your oven with oil, salt, and pepper. They make a fantastic snack.

Absolutely! And then if the pumpkin is from the jack-o-latern is still good, you can make pumpkin pie.

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.

Or the person just wanted to write about pumpkin patches, did that, and getting statistics on them was impossible considering how informal they are.

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.

Or that's how clickbait articles work

How is the article clickbait? What did you expect based on the headline that you didn't get?

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."

You were hoping for a survey of where halloween pumpkin buyers buy their pumpkins?

Yes, seems like knowing how many people buy pumpkins at pumpkin patches might be useful information for an article on the economics of pumpkin patches.

Tough luck

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