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How Does Your Garden Grow?
Tom Beachy thinks there’s money to be made in giant-pumpkin seeds. But will growers pay for something they’ve always
gotten for free?
By
Quinn Werner proudly points to a grayish monster-like vegetable in front of him. “This is my pumpkin,” he says, lovingly touching the huge vegetable’s rough skin. “It should weigh more than 1,300 pounds.” This is the ninth year Werner has had an entry in the competitive sport of growing giant pumpkins. He started out in a friendly competition with a former high school classmate. Now, he is competing against thousands of other ambitious growers around the world, most of whom have also cultivated the backyard hobby into a lifetime obsession.
This Saturday morning, tool factory foreman Werner drove six hours from Saegertown, Pennsylvania, where he lives, to the annual Giant Pumpkin Growers Festival in Cooperstown, New York. A stage is set up in the center of the public square, and a forklift truck awaits the hundred or so contestants. Some are more rounded, some are flatter. They range in color from orange and green to grey and pink. But this isn’t a beauty contest. It’s all about weight.
Early October is the season for giant pumpkin growers to harvest and celebrate. On this weekend, many will have gathered at 50 to 100 weigh-offs around the country. Most have spent countless hours and poured thousands of dollars into their pumpkin patches during the May through September growing season. Despite the fact that giant pumpkins are usually too rough and fibrous for culinary use; would be of interest to only the most ambitious jack-o’-lantern carver; and generate very little in cash awards for winning contestants, these competitions have taken off over the past five years. This year, about 1,500 giant pumpkins were entered in more than 40 major weigh-offs across the country. And the competition has become cutthroat — the world record was broken 15 times from 1988 to 2006, climbing from about 500 to more than 1,500 pounds.
Pumpkin growers do all sorts of crazy things to grow their pumpkins bigger, including but not limited to injecting milk into the pumpkin flesh, tucking their prize specimen under a blanket at night, hoisting it up in slings to get it to grow rounder, and sleeping alongside it to protect it from marauding critters with a taste for pumpkin. All the while, Mother Nature keeps throwing challengers their way: harsh weather, disease, bugs, mice, woodchucks, all of which could damage the skin and disqualify the pumpkin. Sometimes in their zeal to encourage explosive growth, they over-stimulate the pumpkin to the point where it explodes.
But according to the well-seasoned Werner, “The key has to be seeds. Genetics pretty much decides whether a pumpkin will make it or not.” The giant pumpkin is a rare species. Its seeds come from stocks with special genetic features and the lineages are tracked and analyzed with the same scrutiny as those of highly bred pedigree dogs. And just as competitive dog breeders are suspicious of pet stores, most growers are disdainful of commercial retailers like Home Depot. They prefer to get their seeds from trusted fellow growers around the country. These exchanges often take place through Web site discussion boards like bigpumpkins.com. Some seeds are passed along for free, but those from top growers who have produced record-breaking pumpkins are so eagerly sought after that winter auctions are held, and the bidding can get heated. Now, the intensifying demand for seeds that are guaranteed to have certain genetic features has spawned one of the first giant-pumpkin-seed companies. BeachySeeds of Indiana was launched in fall 2005 by Tom Beachy, who has uniquely appropriate credentials. He boasts a ten-year obsession with growing these giants and is a registered financial adviser with Fort Wayne Financial Services in Northeast Indiana.
Giant pumpkins is a niche market of little interest to the big seed companies. After all, you don’t eat them and they can’t be mass-produced; they’re just for competition. The market worldwide is probably no bigger than a few thousand growers who are incredibly picky about their seeds. “The big companies could never mass produce seeds of high enough quality and still make a profit because of the amount of effort and attention required to select the right seed and grow it to such incredible sizes,” according to one grower who is a regular visitor to bigpumpkins.com. To get seeds with a genetic line that can consistently produce the heaviest and biggest pumpkins “takes two months of twenty to a hundred pollinations every morning on upwards of two hundred plants,” Beachy wrote in his mission statement for BeachySeeds. And you can’t leave it up to bees. Growers hand-pollinate the female flowers on every plant using the pollen taken from male flowers. Beachy keeps precise records of the parentage of each plant, and to make sure he has perfect control, he covers the female flower with a fine-mesh fabric to keep bees out. Unlike other obsessed growers, who spend an average of 20 or 30 hours a week tending their pumpkins hoping to get the record-breaker from the four or so candidates in their patches, Beachy manages 200 giants on 17 acres. During the peak summer months, when pumpkins grow at a crazy speed and need intensive care, he works 80 hours a week. “We grow far more plants than almost everyone in the world strictly for genetic research,” he says.
Beachy got his first pumpkin seed from a 25-pound pumpkin his parents bought when he was 14. He was hooked when he grew a 50-pound pumpkin from that seed the very next year. In his college years, he took every biology elective that he could on genetics. Still, the 25-year-old pumpkin grower says he is better at financial management, and he fully understands the challenges of making his company work. After all, “how can a company compete with a product others can get for free,” he asks. By making a better product. In that arena, Beachy’s efforts have already paid off. For the past two years, he has produced outperforming seeds. One he sold for $125 later went for $800 at auction. The offspring of that line consistently weigh around 1,000 pounds, he says. That kind of success is essential because most of his clients come to him through word of mouth.
Beachy declines to disclose sales and profit figures but will say that sales have gone up four times since he launched the business. He claims the goal of Beachyseeds is to produce the best giant pumpkin seed in the world, and to that end, all profits are plowed into genetic research. Beachy is about to embark on a new venture. He has partnered with biologist Nick Welty, a well-known figure in the giant pumpkin grower community, to develop one super seed. They’ve been working on it for almost ten years, and they’re finally at the point of applying for a patent. The seed is a hybrid that grew a 1,258-pounder for a test grower in Minnesota. Beachy believes that with some luck, his super seed is likely to break the world record. Maybe even get closer to every growers dream: a 1 ton pumpkin.
No one at this year’s Cooperstown weigh-in came close to a ton of pumpkin. The winner tipped the scale at 1,376 pounds; Quinn Werner’s came in sixth at 1,221 pounds. But he wasn’t terribly disappointed. At that point, his real champ hadn’t been harvested yet. Recently, he entered it in an Ohio weigh-off, and at 1,556, it won the top prize. It just goes to show that there’s always next year.
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