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).
The economics of pumpkin patches
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#22I 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…
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…
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.
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
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…
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?
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#24The 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 sto…
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.
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#25I 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…
Can’t a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#26I 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…
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.
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#28I 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 t…
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?
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#29I 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…
> 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.
Re: The economics of pumpkin patches
#30The 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.