On a clear fall morning at the Klausmeyer Farm and Pumpkin Patch in Clearwater, the pigs are running their first race of the day.
Dolly Porken, Peter Porker and eventual winner Albert Einswine line up at the starting gate as a crowd enthusiastically cheers them on. The race is among the many fall activities at the pumpkin patch, including tractor rides, a haunted barn and a five-acre corn maze.
This was a hard year for the Kansas pumpkin harvest because of weather, and farms are trying to make up the difference by offering these other activities They’re hoping to pig race their way to profitability.
Owner Debbie Klausmeyer said Kansas farmers have to learn to adapt to bad seasons.
“Kansas is Kansas,” Klausmeyer said. “Bless the meteorologist's heart. It's just hard to predict.”
This summer Kansas experienced a historic drought, the driest since the Dust Bowl in some areas, according to meteorologists. Some counties had less than an inch of rain, while others experienced a deluge of rain at the start and then withering hot temperatures.
It made for a challenging pumpkin growing season. Some Kansas pumpkin patches didn’t have enough pumpkins to open at all for the fall. Others had to buy pumpkins from other farms to meet demand.
Klausmeyer’s family started growing pumpkins in 2007 to support their dairy farm. The agricultural activities followed, and fall became their busiest time of year.
The farm starts growing pumpkins in early June. Over the years, they’ve learned the crop needs a consistent water source, so they built a drip watering system. It came in handy for this dry summer.
“We did not stop the watering, but for two days,” Klausmeyer said. “That’s all we could stop it, because even when we got a few inches of rain, the heat was so immense.””
Even with the watering, the pumpkins didn’t branch out like normal because of a lack of moisture. And the summer nights were so hot that it stunted the pumpkins’ growth. As a result, the farm has smaller pumpkins, like volleyball sized, but not the larger carving pumpkins.
“We do get the comments,” Klausmeyer said. “‘You don't have the large ones you usually do.’ But we tell them no, we don't. It's just weather driven.”
The family planted more pumpkins than normal this year, because they feared the summer would be wet like in 2025. Those additional pumpkins, as well as a late frost extending the growing season, have helped mitigate some of the damage. Plus, there are the other activities, like the pig races, to help.
But it’s still not been a good year, Klausmeyer said. The drought affected their other crops as well, including soybeans and wheat. She believes her family is resourceful, though, and can take whatever the Kansas climate gives them.
“Having a pumpkin patch, it's hard. It's intense,” Klausmeyer said. “But my husband and myself, we grew up farmers. You've got to work when the crops are ready and when it's time.”
Tom Brown, owner of Meadowlark Farm Orchard and Cidery near Wichita, keeps his farm open year round to visitors, but pumpkins are his most popular crop. This year, he invested about $1,000 in seeds and a lot of labor into planting the patch.
In June, the farm had a seven-inch rain that washed out many of his plants, killing about 30% of the pumpkin crop. A lot of their herbicide was washed out too, so the weeds were awful, Brown said.
Then a stretch of oppressive heat blasted in following the rain.
“By mid-August, I started to see a lot of damage in the pumpkins,” Brown said. “It was just rotting in the field. It's like they were sunburnt. Then insects came in and fed on them. When things get stressed, it attracts insects and disease.”
Brown irrigates his crops with water from his two ponds, which he completely pumped dry this summer. He faced a choice of whether to save either his pumpkin crop or apple trees with the last of his water. The apples won out, and Brown wound up buying a lot of his pumpkins from another farm.
“We don't want to bring in pumpkins and scatter them around the pumpkin patch, but that's what we did, and it worked,” Brown said. “But a lot of those upfront costs, those are gone, and you're not going to see that again. But at least we recovered.”
The farm has been transparent with their customers about the tough season and where their pumpkins are from this year, Brown said. And it helps that they have other crops to compensate for the rough pumpkin year.
“We grow peaches, we have strawberries,” Brown said. “There's always something that fails and always something that breaks. But in general we're able to let the other crop and the other activity pick up the slack.”
Roger Nomer reports from the Wichita area for the Kansas News Service. You can email him at nomer@kmuw.org.
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