Turner Farms is Making Pumpkins Great Again

If your front porch looks like a crime scene from Pumpkin CSI, you’re not alone. Americans throw away more than a billion pounds of pumpkins after Halloween. They end up in landfills, rot away, and burp out methane, which is one of the most disgusting greenhouse gases we’ve got. But here in Missoula, we have a better plan.

Read More: The Halloween Horrors of Being Montana Sugarbeet Farmers

Turner Farms is taking all those sad, slumped-over jack-o’-lanterns and putting them to work. They’ve set up bins for getting rid of your used pumpkins, no questions asked. The farm will compost them or feed them to the animals, and the cycle starts all over again. pumpkin waste becomes fertilizer, which is used to grow next year’s pumpkins. It’s basically pumpkin reincarnation.

Why It Matters

When pumpkins go to the landfill, they don’t just disappear. They rot without oxygen and produce methane, which heats the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide. The solution is simple: provide your pumpkins with new air and dirt and allow them to decompose naturally.

What Turner Farms is Doing

Turner Farms is doing just that: they are keeping it local. Turner Farms invited Missoulians to bring their pumpkins to the farm instead of throwing them away. The animals get a treat, and the fields receive fertile soil. It’s environmentally friendly, community-driven, and nowhere near as gross as scraping pumpkin guts out of your trash bin in January.

What if Plants went back to the farm? When Halloween is over, forget the garbage can. Bring your pumpkin to Turner Farms. Remove any paint or decorations that it may have, and let it go full circle.