[HN Gopher] The economics of pumpkin patches
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The economics of pumpkin patches
Author : Anon84
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-10-31 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| jdkee wrote:
| The linked article cites ~770 tons of pumpkins. But the source
| the article cites 13,751 thousands of cwt. A cwt is 100 pounds,
| so the total production is ~1.37 billion pounds or 687,500 tons.
| How can we trust the rest of the calculations in this article if
| the data is so far off?
|
| See https://www.statista.com/statistics/192975/us-pumpkin-
| produc...
| dougSF70 wrote:
| To be honest, it's a once a year event hence their popularity. A
| line (queue) comes with the experience. No need for tech / AI
| assisted solutions? Eyeball the size is the fastest method and
| people who go to pumpkin patches are happy to pay a premium.
| madiator wrote:
| 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).
| paulcole wrote:
| This is the kind of handwringing that makes me 100% sure
| climate change is going to wreck us in ways we can barely
| imagine right now.
|
| Fixing humankind's damage to the environment is going to take
| such sweeping societal changes that Halloween costumes and
| pumpkins shouldn't even be a blip on our radar.
| bane wrote:
| A time honored practice when carving pumpkins is to roast the
| seeds in your oven with oil, salt, and pepper. They make a
| fantastic snack.
| mateo411 wrote:
| Absolutely! And then if the pumpkin is from the jack-o-latern
| is still good, you can make pumpkin pie.
| syedkarim wrote:
| Can't a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?
| madiator wrote:
| People buy a lot of stuff during Christmas, but they get
| used.
|
| EDIT: I think so.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If I had to guess, probably 80% of the stuff I've received
| over the years as Christmas gifts ends up getting used very
| little and then unceremoniously put on a shelf or in the
| trash. And that may be a generous estimate.
| jonhohle wrote:
| We let our kids wear their costumes for play the rest of
| the year. They get worn more in a few play sessions than on
| Halloween.
|
| Also, roasted pumpkin seeds are easy, healthy, and
| delicious.
|
| I wonder if after growing, harvesting, shipping, etc. a
| Halloween pumpkin is carbon negative.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Christmas so far outranks Halloween in consumer spending, I
| can't imagine anyone worrying much about the paltry 10B we
| will spend in 2021 on Halloween. Christmas will be 100x
| bigger.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Compostable but are they all composted? Where I live, yes;
| but in other areas they go inside a plastic bag to a landfill
| where the bag won't break down for many many years.
| madiator wrote:
| > They are renewable and compostable --both things are often
| not possible to achieve in other activities.
|
| I was thinking and wondering if all those 1000s of acres
| could be used to grow something else, which people could eat
| and not throw away. :)
|
| But you make a great point. It is better that we carve
| pumpkins, which are compostable, than use some kind of non-
| compostable stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| People have more than enough food. Where there is a famine
| you find a government behind it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| madiator wrote:
| I hear you. I am not criticizing Halloween, since I take part
| in doing all of these. I did mention costumes going to
| landfill though, not just pumpkins.
|
| What I mentioned doesn't have to be taken to extreme to say
| nothing should be produced and moved around! By that analogy,
| the only way to save the environment is to stop living.
| swixmix wrote:
| How do we know what the environment wants? When we are
| saving it, it's from our perspective. We are saving our
| environment. There are plenty of pests that don't like what
| we're up to.
|
| We are important. :)
| cgriswald wrote:
| I suspect I do far more damage to myself and the environment
| with how I use computing equipment than I'll ever do on
| Halloween. It really depends on _how_ you do Halloween.
|
| > We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them
| to be carved and thrown away
|
| We roast the seeds of any pumpkins we carve and compost the
| remains. The ones we don't carve get turned into pumpkin pie.
| We get immense satisfaction from the planning, carving, and
| displaying of our Jack-o'-lanterns.
|
| > we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the
| landfill
|
| We tend not to buy the cheap costumes, but instead assemble our
| costumes from a combination of costume parts and real items. We
| have chests full of this stuff and even if we don't use a
| particular item again, our spooky entity-creations do. The
| stuff will only end up in the landfill if my inheritors throw
| them away.
|
| > we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown
| (which is probably better than eating them).
|
| _I eat all the candy._ I give myself permission to eat less-
| than-great from Halloween to New Years. If I start getting some
| chub, I work out a little extra. I even did this when I was a
| body builder (just don 't tell any of my trainers).
|
| *Edit: HN-specific markdown...
| monkeydust wrote:
| I 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 PS10) 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 avoid the queues.
|
| Anyone have ideas on how to do this, ideally using existing tech
| mashed together in a low/no code way?
|
| So flow would be ...
|
| - Move your barrow under a camera.
|
| - It would take a picture and through image recognition identify
| and classify pumpkins based on size.
|
| - This would be pushed to cashier with total.
|
| - Maybe where confidence level on classification was low it would
| prompt human intervention.
|
| To me weighing the barrow would be another, perhaps better,
| solution but the farmer wasnt keen on this and ran out of time to
| dig deeper!
| tomrod wrote:
| Here is my thought process:
|
| > - Move your barrow under a camera.
|
| Minimum $5k, closer to $25k, to set physical hardware, network,
| queueing line and instructions
|
| > - It would take a picture and through image recognition
| identify and classify pumpkins based on size.
|
| $100k+ capex to get implemented model on hardware, sufficient
| training samples + training expertise, QA, etc. Ongoing opex
| for maintenance (sun, weather), model maintenance, and cloud
| infra / use
|
| > - This would be pushed to cashier with total.
|
| Customers would argue with cashier, much like self-checkout
| lines at big box stores.
|
| > - Maybe where confidence level on classification was low it
| would prompt human intervention.
|
| Confidence could be high on false positives/negatives.
|
| -----------------------------
|
| Overall, I like the idea of AI-assistive technology
| implementations. Are we to the point where it won't wreck the
| economics of a small operation?
| fouc wrote:
| Or get a pumpkin size detector working as a phone app and
| load it on a cheap $150 android phone taped to a stick
| swixmix wrote:
| A pumpkin size detector is also known as an eyeball.
| pumpkinman wrote:
| Is this unironically how you speak or just because you feel
| you have to because you think this is how "real business men"
| speak?
|
| Saying "Initial startup costs fo equipment and ongoing cost
| of maintenance will not see any sane sort of return" would
| have sufficed
| breckenedge wrote:
| True that's a steep one time cost for one patch, but then
| sell the process and tech to your competitors.
| th5 wrote:
| @pumpkinman - IMO in regards to business viability it's just
| as valuable to see someone's process of how they came to the
| conclusion as the conclusion itself
| pumpkinman wrote:
| Okay. You fund it, I'll build it.
| itronitron wrote:
| If each pumpkin was passed down a conveyor belt in a single
| file line then it's diameter could be easily measured with an
| array of light sensors aimed vertically which could be used to
| set the price in the checkout system. Different customer's
| orders could be separated by a board that spanned the full
| width of the sensor array, which would stop the conveyor until
| it was removed.
| dazc wrote:
| 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 could also be reduced as time goes by so the day
| before halloween you're almost certain to sell the most amount
| possible.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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 for
| various sizes. And to people wanting to spend less, and
| everyone in between. Which is what already happens.
| dazc wrote:
| 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?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have no idea. I generally assume markets with many
| participants that have existed for many years and with
| seemingly no regulations, are the way they are because
| various constraints of nature have tended towards that
| solution.
|
| One would need to know what a typical amount of waste is
| and the cause of that waste to determine if there is too
| much waste and how to fix it. But I am guessing whatever
| waste there is now is a pretty optimal amount of waste
| unless there is some new development that reduces the
| volatility of producing pumpkins.
|
| Farming in general is like that, since so many variables
| are outside of peoples' control. You have to aim for
| extra even if you are not projecting to sell all of it,
| assuming the cost of making the extra is absorbable.
| ranieuwe wrote:
| The way they solve this at a huge pumpkin patch out in
| Snohomish, WA (not Craven) is by having a member of staff walk
| down the line and tally up before people hit the register. They
| write the sizes and sum on a piece of paper, you give it to a
| cashier. Done. Lines went QUICK.
|
| Low tech, works well.
| david38 wrote:
| Weight is the simplest by far. 50,
|
| Otherwise, build a box, and the smallest box that fit the
| pumpkin determines its size.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I wonder if they run into issues selling by weight. Customers
| are usually paying more for the visual size, not however much
| water a particular item has in it.
|
| Does the weight increase linearly with size? If it's
| especially hollow, probably not, while an especially large
| and hollow pumpkin may be uncommon and should be sold for a
| high price.
|
| Edit: I guess a better question would be, can you predict
| desirable carving qualities and visual size accurately as a
| function of pumpkin weight?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| FWIW: Selling by weight seems to be common (and quick) in
| Minnesota.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Take a "sample" of pumpkins, weigh them, have the humans
| write down their prices and fit a pumpkin weight -> price
| model. A pumpkin is sort of a hollow shell if you discount
| the weight of the goop inside, so the weight should
| increase with the square of the diameter.
| swixmix wrote:
| I've sold pumpkins on a farm before. It's a social
| experience where you pay for the pumpkin "ticket" at the
| end.
|
| Whole families dress up for the experience. People love
| being in a pumpkin patch and searching for their favorite
| pumpkin. They love doing it with their family. They enjoy
| the risk of wheeling them and guessing how much they weigh.
|
| And the farm makes more money when they grow heavier
| pumpkins.
|
| This isn't an activity to be taken so seriously.
|
| Scales and measurement aren't really necessary. I could
| eyeball and wobble a pumpkin very quickly and give a fair
| price. But then I am having all the fun, not the customer.
|
| Put the tech into making it a better experience!
|
| Oh is that tractor pulling a wagon? Got to go!
| ip26 wrote:
| Weight is beautifully simple, but the process of unloading
| 100lbs of pumpkin to be weighted & loading them back in
| your cart might be a significant driver of the queue
| latency.
|
| Grocery stores pipeline the unloading & loading steps.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Just roll the wheelbarrow right over an in-floor scale!
| Subtract the wheelbarrow's own weight, which can be
| printed on the wheelbarrow itself. Or for something more
| high tech, put a QR code on the wheelbarrow and you can
| periodically update its empty weight in the database when
| it's empty and scan it at checkout.
|
| This is basically how it works at my local landscaping
| store where they sell gravel by weight.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| The patch we went to had a loop with a string attached. Loop
| went over stem and they wound the string around the pumpkin.
| String had markings so they could tell how much to charge. Took
| all of 2 seconds per pumpkin.
|
| I don't really want a teched out pumpkin patch.
| csydas wrote:
| 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 two sale levels: one for those who want a
| big pumpkin to mess with, one for those who just want a pumpkin
| to carve. The latter doesn't need to be heavily regulated, your
| workers can just eye-ball it and given the margins around
| Halloween you won't really lose out (probably such "eye-
| balling" will benefit the farm, not the consumer)
|
| The technical solution here might eventually be more accurate,
| but it doesn't really benefit anyone. The conditions to make
| the camera detection work are wonky and you probably end up
| wasting more time making sane conditions for detection than you
| do just setting some limits.
|
| Similarly, don't forget that too much tech, and it actually
| might __discourage__ people as they see the farm as non-
| authentic. The aesthetic of an organic "real" farm doesn't
| include a lot of high-tech in many people's minds, and you risk
| offending the wisdom of the masses by being "too
| technological". Granted, there's absolutely no difference in
| the end result, but consumers certainly thing differently about
| it (there's a reason a lot of people still prefer a human
| cashier to the touch-screen terminals at fast food restaurants,
| and it's not efficiency, that's for sure)
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Unload barrow on a checkout cage, top of checkout cage is a
| plank with holes on top with one hole for each size category
| (the bigger the more expensive)
|
| Pumpkin falls on an Arduino controlled button, adds +1 on a
| price multiplier
|
| All pumpkins get unloaded on a checkout wheelbarrow for
| customer to load on their car.
|
| To open the cage and collect the checkout wheelbarrow you have
| to pay price is sum of multipliers times their respective base
| price.
|
| Unsold loaded checkout wheelbarrows in cages can be pushed by
| staff at the beginning of the queue with a "pay with credit
| card and leave in 30 seconds" sign, at a 10% premium.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The 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.
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| Pumpkin is a type of squash. Squash, bean, and corn is the
| "three sisters" so it makes sense those other ones could be
| rotated in.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Three things (from my experience at our little market garden
| farm):
|
| Cucurbits (squashes, gourds, pumpkins, zuchinis, etc.) are
| heavy feeders. They use a lot of nitrogen, require fairly rich
| soil. So they're typical grown in recently amended soil. So
| growing them multiple years in a row in the same spot has some
| challenges.
|
| They attract quite a few pests (fungal and insect). But those
| pests tend to be specific to cucurbits (or Cucurbitaceae,
| including melons, etc.). So it's a good idea to rotate them out
| so that overwintering pests in the plot don't have a free snack
| the next year.
|
| Finally, they make a good crop to plant at the beginning of a
| rotation because they grow quickly and cover the ground,
| blocking the sun and drowning out many weeds. So a good way to
| bring new land into production or to get some perennial weeds
| out of a plot that you want to use for something else the next
| year.
| paulcole wrote:
| I 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 their autumnal canvas.
|
| It's like the person writing the article went in wanting to write
| about pumpkin patches but pumpkin patches aren't as common as
| they hoped so they plowed ahead anyway.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Or that's how clickbait articles work
| detaro wrote:
| How is the article clickbait? What did you expect based on
| the headline that you didn't get?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Or the person just wanted to write about pumpkin patches, did
| that, and getting statistics on them was impossible considering
| how informal they are.
| paulcole wrote:
| Feels like the statistics of how many people buy pumpkins at
| pumpkin patches could be important to an article titled the
| economics of pumpkin patches.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| You were hoping for a survey of where halloween pumpkin buyers
| buy their pumpkins?
| paulcole wrote:
| Yes, seems like knowing how many people buy pumpkins at
| pumpkin patches might be useful information for an article on
| the economics of pumpkin patches.
| jjmellon wrote:
| The 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 store.
| beauzero wrote:
| That's why you have pigs. In the South (USA) pumpkin patches,
| corn mazes, and apple farms are only profitable with weekend
| day treks sold to urban/subdivision bound parents looking to
| get their kids outside. Pumpkins sold in Aldi's cost about $5
| and we have paid as much as $60 for a similar pumpkin picked
| out by one of our kids. It gets us all out of the house and
| helps local farms.
| irrational wrote:
| But, the chart clearly showed that 50-75% of the pumpkins
| cannot be sold.
| jjmellon wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| It's possible, but doesn't seem that way to me. That
| explicitly mention field damage and so forth but don't
| mention unsold pumpkins.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Is there a different type of pumpkin for pumpkin puree? Or
| could they not be used as animal feed?
|
| And why can't you sell the seeds? The article quotes
| ~$100/1k seeds. That's $0.10 per seed. There are ~250 seeds
| per pumpkin - that's $25 per pumpkin. What am I missing?
| Isamu wrote:
| The small "sugar pumpkins" are generally used for
| canning. I think those are harvested with much less
| waste.
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(page generated 2021-10-31 23:01 UTC)