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When I told people I was going to start up a pumpkin farm, everybody thought I was crazy. A pumpkin farm? What do you know about pumpkins? I said, "Nothing, but I'll learn. I'll figure it out." My pumpkin farm brought in $2 million in less than seven weeks in 2025. My business is basically the antique business and auction business. That's been my business all my life. We start to open up the pumpkin farm halfway through September. We end October 31st. You can buy just about any kind of pumpkin here. You know, we've got the gourds, we've got the minis, we've got the jumbos.
It's well over 100,000 people that visit the farm. The attendance is generally increasing just about every year. That is very simple. Take the apple. Oh yeah. I decided to do a pumpkin farm years ago. We went and visited a pumpkin farm down in the Southern Tier. They had muddy parking lots and not a whole lot of restrooms, but there were a zillion people there. I mean, there were just all over the place. And I looked around and I said, I could do this better than this. I bought the pumpkin farm, I believe it was around 1990.
This was just a cow farm. It had some old barns and things like that. We opened up the pumpkin farm in 1996. All of these trees we planted about 25 years ago. When I was a young kid, I grew a couple of pumpkins, and I actually went around and sold them to some of the neighbors. But that really had nothing to do with this because I didn't know much at all about growing pumpkins. We do grow some pumpkins, but we actually contract with a lot of the local farmers to grow them for us also because of the quantity. When we first opened up the first year, I called up a gentleman who ran the World Pumpkin Weigh-Off, asked him to move his site up to here. What we did is we bought insurance to give us $50,000 to somebody if they brought us a 1,000 pound pumpkin,
because the first year I wanted to start with a bang. At that time, the biggest pumpkin ever grown had been about 800 pounds. So they gave us a policy. And don't you know that the first year that we ran here, somebody brought in 1,061 pounder. They won $50,000. It was not local news or national news. It was international news. We were in magazines and newspapers all over the world. We have about 100 people that work here. Hey, Joe, how are you? Oh, jeez. Yes. Now you're gonna have to try one of these. One grilled cheese sandwich. You want tater tots with that? And you're gonna have to try one of these. I only eat one
probably every week or so. Or maybe it's every day or so. It's wonderful to have somebody working with you that is your son, your daughter, this and that. You know, Ben helps me in many, many, many ways. He's worked with me since he was a little kid. My daughter has helped us out periodically here, so it's definitely a family event. We could use some more pumpkins up here on this pumpkin house. We close down the farm right after Halloween, and now we spend probably literally a month cleaning up, putting stuff away for the next year. For the rest of the year, between our antique business, our auction business, we also have 700 storage units
over here that we deal with. So we've got about 20, 25 full-time people over there all times. Coming to The Great Pumpkin Farm during the week is free. Weekends it's $20 a person to get in. Gross revenue for The Great Pumpkin Farm was over $2 million in 2025. The business has been profitable, but we generally take most of the money and try and put it back into it. We've talked about opening up an ice cream parlor that would be open from April, go right through along with the pumpkin farm. We've talked about also putting up a couple other event buildings, eventually. We own about 300 acres. Right now, we're maybe using 75 acres,
so we still have plenty of land to add things over the next years if we need to. I'm sure that the pumpkin farm will be a generational business. My son is very, very much involved with me. I mean, I wouldn't be doing this anymore, probably if he wasn't involved now. Two of his sons are working along with it. Running a pumpkin farm, it's a lot more complicated than what I would have thought it was, just because of all the different events, but it's still a lot of fun. I think the most rewarding
part is when I walk through and I see families with little kids, and the little kids are jumping up and down. I want to see this. I want to see that. They're laughing. They're having fun. We have a wonderful, wonderful time. And fall is by far and away, I don't know of a better place you can be.
