BC Pumpkin Farms, Mapped: Delta Had a Quarter of the Province's Pumpkin Acres

One BC municipality had about a quarter of the province's pumpkin acres in the last farm census, and it isn't in the Fraser Valley Regional District. It's Delta: 211 of BC's 854 pumpkin acres in 2021, on just 17 farms.

A week out from Halloween, I went looking for where the jack-o'-lanterns on Metro Vancouver porches actually come from. Statistics Canada counts pumpkin farms and acres in every Census of Agriculture, down to the municipality, and tracks provincial pumpkin acres every year. The picture is a little surprising: the pumpkin belt sits on the delta of the Fraser River, inside Metro Vancouver, and BC has been planting fewer pumpkins while Ontario plants far more.

Then there's the other half of Halloween pumpkin math: whether you have anywhere to grow one. That depends a lot on what kind of home you live in.

The map: BC's pumpkin belt is in Metro Vancouver

The map opens on Delta. In the 2021 Census of Agriculture, 17 Delta farms reported growing pumpkins on 211 acres, roughly 12 acres a farm. That's a lot of pumpkin for a place most people know for the Massey Tunnel lineup. Richmond, next door on the same river delta, added 84 acres on 14 farms.

Langley is the opposite story: the most pumpkin farms of any area in BC (38), but StatCan doesn't publish its acreage. My read is that a lot of those are small, pick-your-own-sized plots next to other crops rather than big commercial fields, though the census doesn't say so directly. Abbotsford, the one Fraser Valley city on the map, had 32 pumpkin farms and 102 acres.

Add it up and the Greater Vancouver census division (Metro Vancouver) grew 447 of BC's 854 pumpkin acres in 2021, 52%. The whole Fraser Valley Regional District had 126 acres on 57 farms. The Capital Regional District around Victoria, mostly Central Saanich and Saanich, had 87 acres on 71 farms.

Switch to Change since 2011 and Delta goes from 10 pumpkin farms to 17, Langley from 28 to 38, and Maple Ridge from 5 to 11. The City of Vancouver went from 4 to 1. If you know the last pumpkin farm in Vancouver, I'd like to hear about it.

Every BC area that grows pumpkins, ranked

Across BC, 527 farms reported growing pumpkins in 2021, up from 407 in 2011 and 520 in 2016. That's 25% of the province's 2,069 vegetable farms. Pumpkins are the crop everyone plants a few of: BC has 20% of Canada's pumpkin farms but only 7.4% of its pumpkin acres.

Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture, table 32-10-0355-01 (2021) and table 32-10-0418-01 (2011, 2016). Areas whose acreage StatCan didn't publish (Langley and Surrey among them) aren't in this table. Even so, the published regional totals leave at most 118 acres for any one of them, so Delta is BC's biggest pumpkin area either way.

A few names in there deserve a second look. Thompson-Nicola Electoral Area I (Blue Sky Country), in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, had 50 acres on just 4 farms. Spallumcheen, near Armstrong in the North Okanagan, had 21. On the Island, Central Saanich (51 acres) is the Victoria-area pumpkin capital.

BC is planting fewer pumpkins. Canada is planting more.

The Census of Agriculture only comes around every five years. For the year-to-year picture, StatCan's vegetable survey tracks pumpkin acres planted in each province. BC peaked at 1,028 acres in 2016, fell to 574 in 2020, and planted 741 in 2025. That's 28% below 2016.

Over the same years, Canada went the other way, up 28% to 11,728 acres. That's all Ontario: it planted 8,672 acres in 2025, +74% since 2016, adding 3,701 acres, more than Canada's whole net gain of 2,565. In all, 8 of the other nine provinces planted less. Ontario now has 74% of Canada's pumpkin acres; BC has 6.3%.

The survey doesn't say why BC's acreage fell, so I won't pretend to know. It's a small crop here, 5.8% of BC's 12,866 acres of fresh vegetables in 2025, which makes it easy for a few growers switching crops to move the provincial number.

One more number for the Halloween table: BC's pumpkin growers got about 42 cents a pound at the farm gate in 2025 ($5.93 million for 7,005 tons sold). Ontario's got about 26 cents. That's what farms are paid, not what you pay at a pumpkin patch or a grocery bin.

Canada's pumpkin patch, by province

The Acres per farm layer is my favourite. Ontario's pumpkin farms averaged 8.0 acres of pumpkins each in 2021. BC's averaged 1.6. Quebec sits in between at 2.6. In other words, Ontario grows pumpkins like a commodity and BC grows them like a side hustle, Delta excepted.

Source: Statistics Canada, table 32-10-0365-01 (area, production and farm gate value of marketed vegetables, fresh pumpkins); Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture, table 32-10-0355-01 (2021) and table 32-10-0418-01 (2011, 2016). n/a = acres not published for 2021. Some small-province figures carry StatCan quality flags (PEI 2025 is rated "use with caution").

Yards, balconies and Metro Vancouver

Pumpkin vines want space, and the survey shows how much home type matters. Across Canada in 2023, 71% of households in detached houses grew fruit, herbs, vegetables or flowers for themselves, and 91% of those growers used a yard. In high-rise apartments it was 34%, with 67% of growers on a balcony and 44% growing indoors. Townhouses landed at 57% and low-rise apartments at 37%.

Metro Vancouver had the lowest share of green-thumb households among BC's metro areas, and my guess is that all those apartments explain a good part of it: 56%, against 76% in Kamloops and 73% in Nanaimo. Metro Vancouver growers lean on balconies more than most: 39% used one, against 30% across Canada.

For what it's worth, Metro Vancouver's share has crept up from 50% in 2011 to between 55% and 57% in every survey since 2015. Kamloops topping BC and coming second in Canada, behind only Peterborough, Ontario (78%), is the kind of fact I'd use to win an argument at a Halloween party.

What this means if you're buying

For the rest of the Halloween week: my Vancouver trick-or-treat map ranks neighbourhoods by houses per block and street lights. For the market side, see the Abbotsford market update and the Surrey real estate market.

How I did this

Farms and acres by area come from the Census of Agriculture: table 32-10-0355-01 for 2021 and table 32-10-0418-01 for 2011 and 2016 (full CSV downloads). "Farms" means farms reporting pumpkin area for the 2021 crop year in the Census of Agriculture (taken in May); a farm that grew one row counts the same as one with 200 acres. The census reports by census consolidated subdivision, which is usually a municipality plus any small neighbours folded into it. StatCan doesn't publish acreage where it would identify a farm or where the estimate is too unreliable (flags "x" and "F"); I left those blank rather than guessing. The upper bound for Delta's lead comes from subtracting every published area from the published regional and provincial totals.

Provincial acres, production and farm gate value come from the annual vegetable survey, table 32-10-0365-01, fresh pumpkins, 2007 to 2025. It measures acres planted, so it doesn't line up exactly with the census acreage. Cents per pound = farm gate value divided by marketed production (short tons of 2,000 lb).

Growing your own comes from StatCan's Households and the Environment Survey, table 38-10-0025-01 (provinces and metro areas) and table 38-10-0026-01 (by home type, Canada only). It asks whether a household grew fruit, herbs, vegetables or flowers for its own use in the past 12 months, not pumpkins specifically. The "where" shares are a percentage of the households that grew something.

Maps: municipal boundaries from the BC Data Catalogue (Open Government Licence – British Columbia), provinces from Natural Earth. Statistics Canada data is used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. The nicknames and opinions are mine; the numbers are StatCan's.