How One Illinois Town Makes 85% of the World's Canned Pumpkin | Pumpkin Harvest

By the middle of October, one field in central Illinois turns a colour you will never see in a pumpkin patch. Not orange. Tan. This is the pumpkin harvest almost nobody photographs, and it ends up in a can in your pantry. American farmers grow about 1.4 billion pounds of pumpkins a year, and roughly 85 percent of that acreage is grown to be looked at, carved and thrown away. The rest is grown to be food, and almost all of that pumpkin harvest travels to one town of 17,000 people with a canning plant nearly a hundred years old. This documentary follows the whole chain: growers working deep prairie soil in late spring, bees deciding the crop in a single morning, and why powdery mildew can collapse a field three weeks before the pumpkin harvest begins. Then the machines arrive: a harvester lifts an entire row off bare ground while a trailer runs alongside. Inside the plant, the pumpkin harvest becomes raw material — washed, cut, steam cooked, milled and sealed into cans in roughly ninety minutes. We also cover 2015, when eleven inches of June rain cut the crop in half and shelves ran empty. This is the pumpkin harvest as it really happens. Which part surprised you most? Tell us in the comments. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 00:00 Pumpkin Harvest 03:37 Pumpkin Planting 07:10 Hand Picking Pumpkins 08:43 Pumpkin Harvester 11:27 Canned Pumpkin Processing ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🌾 FARM LENS — one crop, start to finish. Every episode follows a single crop from the soil it's planted in, through harvest and processing, to the shelf it ends up on. 📂 Full series:    • Farm Lens — Harvest and Processing   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Disclaimer: This video is a documentary compilation created for educational purposes. Footage is either licensed stock, used under fair use, or created digitally for illustration. Figures are drawn from public agricultural data and may vary by season and source. If you own material shown here and would like it credited or removed, please contact us. 📧 Contact: menomanfashion@gmail.com #pumpkinharvest #pumpkinfarming #cannedpumpkin #agriculture #farming