Gourd-growing family finds award-winning edge slashing labour costs 0
On their farm near Aylmer, the Howe family grows hundreds of thousands of pumpkins.
Mostly sold to the Loblaw chain, the big gourds are exported province-wide.
But since every pumpkin is hand picked, harvest can be a mountain of work.
Until recently, each one also had to be washed before being shipped.
“You can imagine having to clean every pumpkin,” said Ryan Howe, who operates the farm with his brothers Rick and Kevin and parents Glenn and Monica. “It’s a lot of labour.”
Two years ago, the family began testing an different way of growing, modifying no-till methods used by organic farmers in the U.S. and tailoring them to suit the Aylmer area’s sandy soil.
Labour costs fell, thanks to reduced need for washing and weeding.
A prestigious regional Premier’s Award for excellence in agri-food innovation.
The method involves growing a rye cover crop in the fall and using a custom-made roller to crimp the rye in the spring, denting its stalks and forcing it to stay down. Pumpkins are planted in the same fields and grown atop a thick bed of fallen rye, rarely touching the ground.
“It grows a clean pumpkin,” Ryan said, noting an added benefit is that the sun can’t bake the soil.
“It (the fallen rye) holds the moisture in the soil, it holds the nutrients in the soil and there’s just benefits the whole way around for it.”
There’s less need to weed because the rye out-competes weeds and smothers them, Ryan said. The farm still uses herbicides but in smaller amounts, since there are fewer weeds to kill.
The farm has also seen an increase in salable pumpkins, since the method also helps reduce decay.
The Premier’s Award came with a $5,000 prize, which will go toward equipment and improving the growing method, which the family developed in just two years.
“There’s still things that we learned last year that we would do different again this year,” Ryan said. “So it’s never perfected. It’s a work in progress.”
HOWE FAMILY FARMS
- Grows about 300,000 pumpkins a year; also other crops
- Pumpkins grown for jack-o-lanterns and pie filling
- About 40 years and five generations in business
- New growing method cut pumpkin-washing labour costs by about 25%, weeding labour by about 75%