Farm villages across the country hold annual giant pumpkin weighing competitions, encouraging growers to invest time and money into feeding giant gourds. With approximately 125 giant pumpkin contests held each year, the Half Moon Bay World Championship has been called the “Super Bowl” of pumpkin contests.
Last year’s runner-up, Brandon Dawson, an engineer and grower from Santa Rosa, Calif., won the Half Moon Bay World Championship on Oct. 13 with a pumpkin weighing 2,346 pounds. Dawson earned $21,114 for this year’s win, or $9 per pound for pumpkins. If he had broken the world record, he would have received an additional $30,000 bonus.
Last year, Travis Zinger, a horticulture and landscaping teacher at Anoka Technical College, grew a 2,471-pound 2024 pumpkin, but it wasn’t his largest pumpkin. In 2023, he broke the world record for the plumpest pumpkin on Earth with a 2,749-pound monster gourd. Ginger won the Half Moon Bay pumpkin weigh-in for the third consecutive year starting in 2022.
The festival, held in Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco, attracts tens of thousands of visitors. The winner of the competition will be paid $9 per pound, or $30,000, for breaking the world record.
How much does a giant pumpkin weigh?
A pumpkin is considered giant if it weighs more than 150 pounds. Axios reported that some giant pumpkins can grow up to 50 pounds a day if conditions are right. Once separated from the vine, these pumpkins can lose 6 to 8 pounds per day.
Giant pumpkins can weigh over 2,000 pounds. According to the online Alaska Wild Fact Sheet, Zinger’s 2023 award-winning pumpkin is adult male walrus.
Giant pumpkin keeps breaking records
More than 50 years ago, the winning pumpkin at the Half Moon Bay Championship weighed 132 pounds. Since the competition began in 1974, the pumpkins have steadily grown in size. The winning pumpkin in 2023 weighed nearly 2000% more than the winning pumpkin in 1974.
History of pumpkin weighing competition
Jacques La Rue, a former competitive grower and current historian and statistician for the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the international governing body for weighing competitions, said the pursuit of record-setting pumpkins dates back to at least the late 1800s.
At the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, William Warnock set the official mark at 400 pounds, and in 1904 he beat that record by 3 pounds. That record stood for 72 years until Bob Ford broke it with a 451-pound gourd. In 1980, Canadian Howard Dill greatly boosted the movement by setting one of his three world records with a 459-pound pumpkin, a year after developing Dill’s Atlantic Giant Pumpkin seed.
The Half Moon Bay weigh-ins began in 1974, when the California town narrowly defeated Circleville, Ohio, in a friendly contest for the fictional title of Pumpkin Capital of the World.
Although competition from other sites has become increasingly intense, La Rue said Half Moon Bay is still positioning itself as a strong contest, and is in the top spot by hosting the world record set by Zinger.
“Right now, Half Moon Bay is on top of the world in terms of (average) weight of 10 pumpkins ever weighed in one location,” La Rue said.
Contributor: Natalie Neisa Alland
Source Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weighing
