Trick-or-treaters face lack of pumpkins at Hallowe’en after drought reduces harvest

BRITAIN is facing a shortage of pumpkins this Hallowe’en as growers warn poor weather has reduced their harvest by as much as a third.

Supermarkets are already grappling with the fall-out from this year’s drought, prompting Lidl and Waitrose to start selling more “wonky” fruit and vegetables in an effort to keep shelves stocked.

Pumpkin growers warned that this may be trickier with their crops, as they operate in a “time-limited market so people tend to grow their acreage to what they think demand will be”.

Guy French, who together with his wife Emily runs Foxes Farm Produce, one of the UK’S leading pumpkin wholesale growers, said it came down to the model, where “pumpkins are worth something on October 31 and then nothing on November 1”.

This means that when there is a drought as there has been this year and the yield is down, “you get a shortage”.

Foxes Farm, in Basildon, Essex, has been picking since Aug 15, and said yield this year was down between a quarter to a third.

Mr French said: “The quality of the pumpkin is good – the skin finish is good, they’re a really good orange. But the drought has had a knock-on impact on yield. You just haven’t got the volume there.”

He said he expected there to be “some sort of shortage”, with Foxes Farm having already sold out of the pumpkins it sells for event planners to run pumpkin patches or for their Hallowe’en events.

He added: “That’s unusual, and that’s partly down to reduced yield but also increased inequities because of what the yield is like elsewhere in the country.”

The comments come amid calls for ministers to act to help shore up food security, after a summer which has seen farmers struggling with the driest July on record and labour shortages which have made it harder to pick crops quickly.

Farmers are also wrangling with surging energy prices, which are expected to feed across into higher prices on the supermarket shelves.

Mr French said: “We are selling at a higher price, but the main factor for that is our input costs.

“We always say to customers, if you think the price of filling up your car with diesel has doubled, think of what it does for a tractor. And then our fertiliser costs are also up because of the war in Ukraine.”

‘The quality is good, they’re a really good orange. But the drought had a knock-on impact on yield’