"E very day it’ll just start doubling in size,” says Travis Gienger (B.S. ‘03) in late May about what he hopes will be another world- record pumpkin by October.

This past spring, Gienger’s hoped-for prize pumpkin was still just a vine that he had been nurturing indoors before moving it outside to his patch near Anoka, Minnesota. As of late July (pictured above), it’s on its way to being another prize-winning contender.

Gienger notes that once these big pumpkins get to around day 30 and 600 pounds, “it’ll start cranking—[adding] 70 pounds a day, three-quarters of an ounce a minute,” he says.

In 2023, Gienger, who earned an agricultural education degree from the U of M’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, set a Guinness world record for the heaviest pumpkin ever grown (2,749 pounds). It was also the largest pumpkin by circumference (21 feet 1 inch).

He holds five additional world records, some of which he’s set and then broken again, including largest and heaviest jack-o’-lantern, as well as North American records for pre-carved pumpkins, but 2023 was his first world record for an uncarved pumpkin. (He’d named it Michael Jordan months before it set the world record, in honor of the NBA player’s jersey number and the year, with the hope that it, too, would become the greatest to ever play the game.)

“They love [pumpkin records] over at Guinness, because there’s a lot of things like standing on one foot for an hour or something, you know, that’s not really a photogenic thing,” says Gienger. “But people want to see a picture of a ginormous jack-o’-lantern or a ginormous pumpkin.”

Gienger grew up in Anoka, the self-proclaimed “Halloween Capital of the World,” and after his world record win in 2023, the community honored him in its Halloween parade while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Anoka’s mayor declared Oct. 28, 2023 as Travis Gienger Day.

“Travis Day, yeah,” says Gienger. “It was statewide. I went down to Anoka, it was all filmed and everything, and the mayor’s like, ‘I do a lot of things man, but I never got my own day.’”

Since setting the world record, Gienger’s done more interviews than he can count for publications ranging from the L.A. Times to Smithsonian magazine and “a lot I’ve never even heard of,” he says.

Gienger has been growing pumpkins since he was a boy, an interest shared by others in his family—including his father. “Dad was growing small pumpkins, smaller but big—maybe 100 pounders. So when I was 13 or 14, I grew a 447 pounder—that was big for back then, and that hooked me,” he says.

Gienger, who’s also a part-time horticulture instructor at Anoka Technical College, says, “I don’t think I can go a day without mentioning something that relates to [pumpkins], and my students would tell you the same. Everything correlates to pumpkins one way or another.”

He also actively shares pumpkin-growing tips on social media for his thousands of followers, and often volunteers with the U of M’s Extension service, creating how-to videos and tips for would-be pumpkin growers—especially for young growers through his involvement in Extension’s annual 4-H Pumpkin Challenge.

In past years, Gienger won both the youth and adult pumpkin-growing divisions at the Minnesota State Fair. But these days he drives his pumpkin 2,000 miles to the mother of all pumpkin championships in Half Moon Bay, California’s Art & Pumpkin Festival.

“I chose California because it’s the biggest out there and it gets the most publicity,” says Gienger. “And the State Fair pays about $300. Half Moon Bay pays $30,000,” he says, an award amount he took home last year.

There are other benefits to growing world-record pumpkins, too.

“I kind of knew back in the day that the guy who gets the big ticket ... you just create a name for yourself. So now it’s like suddenly you won’t have to pay for pumpkin seeds, you get all the fertilizers and things sent to you. That’s a big savings for me,” he says.

So, what does it cost to grow a world record pumpkin?

“I figure I’ll have, street value, probably $50,000 into these two pumpkins this year,” says Gienger.

And what he doesn’t recoup from prize money and sponsorships, Gienger gets back in seed sales at his website Greatpumpkinseeds.com, where they sell for up to $350 per seed to competitive pumpkin growers around the world.

Of course, sharing those prize seeds comes with its own risks, says Gienger.

“Last year I shared seeds for the North American record with everyone, and they almost beat me. The No. 2 and No. 3 in the world last year were from my seeds,” says Gienger.

So where does this growing obsession end for Gienger?

“3,000 pounds is the big goal,” says Gienger, who has named one of his two two pumpkins this year “Triple M,” each M representing 1,000 in the Roman numeral system (the other pumpkin is named Rudy). “It’d be cool to get there first. I always start out every year, and I say, ‘I’ve got the same goal I had last year: just to get some pictures with the family,’” says Gienger, whose 3-year old daughter, Lily, features in many pumpkin photos.

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