Long Island pumpkin farmers add attractions as sales fall, costs rise

The pumpkin business isn’t what it used to be.

Long Island pumpkin farmers are seeing fewer customers in their patches due partly to more competition from big-box retailers, they say, while national retail pumpkin sales have declined. Meanwhile, farmers are paying more for the diesel used to operate farm machinery and transport pumpkins and other products.

Heavy rain also has hurt some pumpkin crops and kept customers away from local farms this fall, farmers said.

Some farmers are trying to offset their losses by raising prices or leaning more into agritourism, also called “agritainment,” which combines agriculture and entertainment. They are boosting marketing of or expanding their entertainment offerings, including hayrides, playgrounds, corn mazes, tractor rides and other fee-based activities.

Consumers’ desire for photo ops of their visits to post on social media is helping to drive foot traffic at farms, since pumpkin-picking for families has become an outing whose significance is similar to that of Christmas tree buying, said Raghela Scavuzzo, associate director of food systems development at the Illinois Farm Bureau.

Long Island farmer Ferdie Schmitt believes the fall activities his farm offers have created a niche for him.

“They’re selling pumpkins cheaper in the stores than I am here, but I’m giving [my customers] a lifetime of memories here, which they cannot get in the supermarkets and in the big-box stores,” said Schmitt, a third-generation owner of F&W Schmitt’s Family Farm, which was started in Melville in 1950.

At his 22-acre Melville farm, customers pick their own pumpkins, eggplants, sunflowers, zinnias and string beans. The farm grows about 20% of the pumpkins it sells, while shipping in the remaining 80% from two farms in Pennsylvania, Schmitt said.

Schmitt’s number of pumpkins sold and revenue from the fruit have fallen about 50% over the past five years, he said, adding that the farm is paying 20% more for freight shipping of pumpkins, fertilizer and other products than it did last year. The price of fertilizer itself has risen at least 20% over the past two years, he said.

Schmitt’s responded this year by adding more activities to its Annual Fall Festival, which is open weekends and holidays from Sept. 19 to Oct. 31.  The festival now has a trike track where adults and children ride tricycles, a kiddie soybean maze, a nine-hole minigolf course and a wooden combine where children can play.

Those features were added to existing amenities, including a haunted house, wagon rides, corn maze, playground and mechanical pig races.

Schmitt’s also increased the price of admission for the festival by $1, to $24 per person age 2 and older, while the price of a pumpkin was increased by 1 cent, to 80 cents per pound. 

But rainy weather this fall has reduced customer visits, Schmitt said.

But it’s not just the decline in pumpkin sales that is fueling farm agritainment, farmers said.

“The reason everybody is doing this is because prices of farm vegetables and produce, like soybean and corns and things like that, they’re not making any money in those areas when they have to sell wholesale,” Schmitt said.

Garden City resident John Kancso has been taking his children to Schmitt's Family Farm for years, he said as he visited with his 9-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter amid a sea of pumpkins Monday at the farm, which was bustling on the Columbus Day holiday.

The farm's prices are fair, he said.

"If you don't grab a big pumpkin, you know, it's fine. ... For the activity during this particular time, I think you're making a small investment for memories, so, not a big deal," said Kancso, 49.

Dampened sales

Five states — Illinois, California, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — produced nearly 72% of the pumpkin crop in the United States last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Illinois had the largest pumpkin acreage and harvested the most pumpkins — about 533 million pounds — which was more than the combined total from the four other top-producing states, according to the USDA.

This year, weather caused crop disruptions in some high-producing states, including heavy rain in parts of Illinois and Indiana and drought in Texas, Scavuzzo said. Excessive rain can make pumpkins more susceptible to disease, she said.

But there is no shortage of pumpkins nationwide, Scavuzzo said.

"Overall, the entire production, when you average everything out between places, still averaged as a good year because some areas had really good pumpkins growth, and then others had total losses," she said.

Of the more than 15,000 pumpkin-producing farms in the U.S. in 2022, New York State had the most — 1,144 — according to the USDA’s latest Census of Agriculture.

Nationwide, pumpkin sales at supermarkets and mass merchant retailers for the year ending Oct. 3 generated $214 million, down $8.2 million, or 3.7%, from the previous year, according to data from NielsenIQ, a Chicago-based market research firm. 

The number of pumpkins sold also declined by 913,371, or 1.3%, to 71 million during the same period.

The war in Iran, which began Feb. 28 and has disrupted oil and fuel shipments through the Strait of Hormuz,  is a major factor in grocery and fuel price hikes.

Diesel fuels the trucks that transport food and the machinery used on farms, and natural gas are important inputs in some fertilizer production and distribution.

The national average price of a pumpkin at major grocery stores from Oct. 3 to 15 was $5.21, up about 3% from $5.06 a year earlier, according to USDA data.  

Pumpkin prices have remained fairly flat at grocery stores and big-box stores because they buy large volumes on contracts set earlier in the year, Claudia Schmidt, associate professor of agricultural economics at Penn State University, said in email.

“The ones I would watch are agritourism operators who don't grow enough pumpkins themselves and have to bring them in. They feel the higher trucking costs,” she said.

For farms that grow their own pumpkins, rising expenses also are putting pressure on their businesses.

Kraszewski Farm annually grows pumpkins on 75 of its 400 acres across multiple sites in the Town of Southampton, said Hank Kraszewski, who started the farm with his wife in the early 1980s. Typically, the farm sells about half of its pumpkins wholesale to other farms, while the rest are sold to retail customers who pick their own pumpkins at its Hank’s Pumpkintown site in Water Mill, he said.

This year, however, not enough pumpkins have ripened, leading the farm to cut the share of pumpkins it sells wholesale to 20%, he said.

“I blame it on the rain, but I have other friends that grow pumpkins all over the Northeast, and they all keep calling me with the same question: Why aren’t they ripening?” he said.

In addition to pumpkin picking, Pumpkintown, a 30-acre site that opened for the fall season Sept. 12 and will close Nov. 1, offers apple picking, corn mazes, wagon rides, a playground, games and other activities, as well as a market selling apple cider, roasted corn, doughnuts, pies and other treats.

Heavy rain also has affected customer visits to Pumpkintown, which was closed on most weekend days in September because of the weather, Kraszewski said.

But, even before this year’s abnormally rainy summer and fall, pumpkin sales had been lackluster for a few years at Pumpkintown, said Hank Kraszewski, who partly attributes the sales decline to more consumers choosing to buy cheaper pumpkins at discount stores, such as the grocery chain Aldi.

“Nobody’s loading up eight to 10 in a wheelbarrow [at Pumpkintown anymore]. They pick two or three really nice ones. Then they’re content,” he said.

To offset the rising cost of fuel and other farm expenses, Kraszewski Farm raised the wholesale price of its pumpkins to $200 a bin this year, up from $185 in 2025.

But the price of admission at Pumpkintown remained the same — $24 per person on weekends and $17 per person on weekdays — and the price of a pumpkin has been 79 cents a pound for the past five years, he said.

While this fall’s sales from admission to Pumpkintown and pumpkin purchases won’t be stellar for Kraszewski Farm, the farm’s summer sales soared on purchases of strawberries, raspberries, sweet corn, tomatoes, lettuce and watermelon, he said. The farm also had strong sales of sod and nursery stock, he said.

In farming, growing seasons and success are unpredictable, Hank Kraszewski said.

“Every year, it’s something different. Not everything always pans out,” he said.