Pumpkin to talk about

You know how that old saying goes: you reap what you sow. And with October well underway, pumpkins might be at the top of the harvest list for many Canadians. 

Whether it’s baked into pies for Thanksgiving, reminiscent of a certain spiced fall beverage, or carved for your stoop on Halloween, there’s no denying that pumpkins are an autumn essential. 

In 2025, 4,746 hectares of fresh pumpkins were planted and 4,387 were harvested—both the highest on record since we started tracking this in 2007.

Marketed production reached a five-year high of 75 601 tonnes in 2025, though short of the all-time high reached in 2020 (96 220 tonnes).

The majority of the country’s production of pumpkins in 2025 came from Ontario, with most of the remainder coming from Quebec and British Columbia.

Our food availability series estimates the amount of food available in Canada on a per-capita basis. In this data series and in our trade data, certain commodities are tracked together.

The availability of fresh pumpkins and squash has been slowly declining in recent years, to an 18-year low of 2.53 kilograms per person in 2025. We’ve slowly been moving away from our record-high year in 2014 (3.76 kg), but we’ve also trended upwards overall since we began tracking these data in 1978 (0.17 kg). 

One reason for the decline may be that the export business seems to be holding steady. In 2020, Canada exported its all-time high of 44.6 million kilograms (kg) of pumpkins, squash and gourds, before declining to 41.8 million kg in 2025—the second-highest volume on record. The export haul in 2025 was valued at a record $34.4 million, surpassing the previous record of $34.3 million set in 2022.

Nearly all of Canada’s exports in this product category (over 99%!) headed to the United States in 2025, with the rest shared between France and its own territory within our borders, Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Exports typically peak in September with October close behind, but some years have seen a swap.

In 2021, the Census of Agriculture counted nearly 2,600 farms that reported growing pumpkins, planting over 11,500 acres of pumpkin patches. 

How many farms and acres will there be in 2026? To find out, stay tuned for the first release of data from the 2026 Census of Agriculture on May 12, 2027.