The weather this growing season is partially to blame for what an Indiana County farmer calls his worst season ever for pumpkins. 

Yarnick’s Farm usually supplies supermarkets and vendors in the Pittsburgh area with pumpkins. But not this year, as the farm didn’t have enough pumpkins for anything other than its market. 

“It’s been a challenge from the beginning,” Yarnick’s Farm owner Dan Yarnick said. 

The farm faced many days of rain before drought conditions, Yarnick said. It spent Friday mowing its Pumpkin patch, the earliest its pumpkin harvest has ever concluded. Usually at this time of year, kids are on the farm picking pumpkins. 

“We give a hay ride to the pumpkin patch, and it’s so much fun to haul a wagon load of kids, and they’re all happy. And this year, we just couldn’t do it because we didn’t have enough pumpkins,” Yarnick said. 

Last year, across 20 acres, 500 bins of pumpkins were grown, Yarnick said. This year, across similar acreage, the farm could only muster around 60 bins.

“It’s really bad,” Yarnick said. 

Yarnick’s Farm ended up losing money on pumpkins this year, he said.  A few factors came together to produce the smaller crop, Yarnick said. 

 “In the spring, you remember it was so wet, Rain, rain, rain, rain every day,” Yarnick said. 

The farm finally found a dry day to plant seeds, but that very same night, 3 inches of rain fell, damaging the seeds’ ability to take hold.

“And then we got no rain. So, the ones that did come up didn’t have size, didn’t have near the quality we like to see here at Yarnick’s,” he said. “It was the driest season that I have ever farmed in.” 

It was the unseasonably dry to severe drought across our region during the growing season that contributed to not just a smaller pumpkin crop but also other crops as well. 

To add insult to injury, following the dry conditions, deer, who had little to eat in the woods, began eating Yarnick’s pumpkins. 

Yarnick’s Farm will reduce how much it grows next year due to rising farming prices and increasingly unpredictable weather, Yarnick said. 

“It’s it’s a challenge,” Yarnick said. “I get disgusted, but I keep moving. What are you gonna do?”