Giant Pumpkins and Spice

Agronomist and farmer grower Joe Ailts shares his unique cover crop-pumpkin-sweet corn rotation, the benefits of early soybeans, and his secrets for growing competitive giant pumpkins

Acres U.S.A. Did you grow up on the farm? And can you describe your current farm context? 

Joe Ailts. Sure. My grandpa owned a 65-cow dairy and about 220 acres of farmland here in northwest Wisconsin. We’re right on the northern boundary of what you could consider the corn belt. Interest rates in the eighties squeezed him out, and none of his four children, one of whom was my dad, wanted to continue the farming operation. So, they sold the cows, sold the equipment, kept the land, and kept the barns and such. 

I like to say that I was born with a green thumb, a competitive spirit, and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and when you put all that into a blender, what comes out is competitive giant pumpkins. I’ve been growing competitive giant pumpkins since I graduated college back in 2000. This will be my 25th growing season. I absolutely love the hobby. It’s a lot of fun, with great comradery. When you’re trying to grow the largest fruit on the planet, there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of heartbreak.

The one thing that’s unique about giant pumpkin growers is that we’re always trying to push the boundaries in the pursuit of 3,000 pounds. We’re looking under every rock to find more ways to push these pumpkins even bigger. A lot of the practices have now evolved to using things like biologicals. We use a lot of mycorrhizal fungi as an inoculant. 

The unique thing about a pumpkin plant is that as the vine starts to grow across the ground surface, it puts out laterals, and at each lateral it puts out even more laterals, and out of all these laterals comes adventitious root systems, which grow into the ground and significantly increase the footprint of the plant root system. Every one of these adventitious roots is an opportunity for a endeavoring gardener to go out there and do things — to apply a biological, for example, or spoon-feed it nutrition — things like seaweed and kelp and other natural biostimulants. 

I believe both as a hobbyist gardener as well as an agronomist that these types of stimulant interventions at these adventitious roots are what have driven this hobby to be able to produce nearly 3,000-pound pumpkins. You can’t find this growth trajectory anywhere else in nature; we’ve taken the size of the fruit and essentially doubled it in less than a decade. 

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin River Falls with a degree in biotech and an emphasis in plant physiology. I wanted to go work for a seed company and help develop the next big corn hybrid, but as fate would have, it didn’t exactly work out that way. But about 15 years ago, I decided to answer the call back into agriculture. I started working for a large seed company, Pioneer Seed, as an agronomist for eight years, and then decided to break out and do my own independent consulting about four years ago.

It’s been awesome because there just aren’t a whole lot of agronomy specialists that understand soil health, cover cropping, minimal tillage practices, the biological side of things, working with nature, etc. — working with biology to help produce bigger, better crops. There are so many other farmers out there who are hungry and thirsty for this type of knowledge. 

Acres U.S.A. What types of clients do you have? Mostly corn and soy, or other crops too? 

Ailts. The demographic is really unique up here. Growers in northern Wisconsin actually grow a lot of different crops, including a number of specialty vegetables. Obviously corn and soybeans dominate most of the acres, but there’s a lot of other neat things that we grow to. We’re seeing an increase in small-grain production, which I think is awesome because of what that rotation does for row crops as well as for soil health. There’s a robust snapbean harvest up here as well. There are a lot of non-GMO soybeans, which present its own challenges. Potatoes are a pretty significant portion of the crops up here, too. 

Interestingly, northwest Wisconsin has the second-highest density of CSA farms in all the nation. Northern California is the most dense, but northwest Wisconsin is right behind them.