QUEENS COUNTY farm museum is one of the few pastoral corners in New York City. It has an apiary, an orchard, livestock and, in autumn, a pumpkin patch. Parents take photos of their tykes, some dressed as pumpkins, sitting on a mound of pumpkins. Twenty-somethings, hoping not to look like pumpkins, strike poses next to hay bales and post them on Instagram. This meeting of big tech and smallholding might seem as natural as a Clarendon filter. In fact the two go together.
“The crazy thing is, that the popularity of pumpkin pie and the jack-o-lanterns is helping, has helped to rejuvenate small family farms,” she adds. Libby’s, which produces most of the canned filling for pumpkin pies, relies on a few dozen small-scale farmers. According to NIQ, a market-research firm, nearly $820m of pumpkin-related products, which includes everything from pumpkin candles to pumpkin cinnamon bagels, were sold over the past year, a 9% annual increase.