Farming towns across the country host annual giant pumpkin weigh-off competitions, inspiring growers to invest their time and money into feeding massive gourds. About 125 giant pumpkin contests are held each year, but the Half Moon Bay World Championship is referred to as "the Super Bowl" of pumpkin competitions.

Brandon Dawson, an engineer and grower from Santa Rosa, California, who was the runner-up last year, won the Half Moon Bay World Championship on Oct. 13 with a pumpkin that weighed 2,346 pounds. Dawson won $21,114 for his victory this year, or $9 a pound for his pumpkin. If he had broken the world record, he would have received an additional $30,000 bonus.

Last year, Travis Gienger, a horticulture and landscape teacher at Anoka Technical College, grew a 2,471-pound pumpkin in 2024, but that was not his largest by far. In 2023 he broke the world record for plumpest pumpkin on the planet with a 2,749-pound monster gourd. Gienger won the Half Moon Bay pumpkin weigh-off three years in a row starting in 2022.

The festival in Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco draws tens of thousands of visitors. Winners of the competition are paid $9 a pound or $30,000 for breaking a world record.

How much do giant pumpkins weigh?

A pumpkin is considered giant if it weighs over 150 pounds. Axios reported some giant pumpkins can grow up to 50 pounds a day if conditions are favorable. Once these pumpkins are cut from their vines, they can lose 6 to 8 pounds a day.

Giant pumpkins can grow to over 2,000 pounds. According to an online Alaska Wild fact sheet, Gienger's 2023 winning pumpkin was the equivalent weight of an adult male walrus.

Giant pumpkins continuously break records

More than 50 years ago, the winning pumpkin from the Half Moon Bay Championship weighed 132 pounds. Since the competition began in 1974, pumpkins have steadily increased in size. In 2023, the winning pumpkin had increased in weight by nearly 2000% compared with the 1974 winning pumpkin.

History of pumpkin weigh-off competitions

Jack La Rue, a former competitive grower who's now a historian and statistician for the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth - the international ruling body for weigh-off contests - said the pursuit of record-setting pumpkins dates back to at least the late 1800s.

At the 1900 world's fair in Paris, William Warnock set the recognized mark at 400 pounds and topped it by 3 pounds in 1904. That record stood for 72 years until Bob Ford smashed it with a 451-pound gourd. In 1980, Canadian Howard Dill gave the movement a major push when he set one of his three world records with a 459-pound pumpkin the year after developing Dill's Atlantic Giant Pumpkin seeds.

The Half Moon Bay weigh-off began in 1974, when the California town barely edged out Circleville, Ohio, in an amiable contest for the fictitious title of pumpkin capital of the world.

The competition from other sites has increasingly gotten tougher, but La Rue said he still ranks Half Moon Bay as the leading contest, kept aloft by hosting the world mark set by Gienger.

"Right now, Half Moon Bay stands on top of the world for the heaviest 10 pumpkins (on average) ever weighed at one site,'' La Rue said.

Contributing: Natalie Neysa Alund

Source Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off

Record-breaking pumpkins can weigh as much as a walrus