Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off Calibration Office Requires Certified Scales After 2025 Dispute

PUMPKIN HOLLOW — The Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off Calibration Office announced Monday that all scales used in sanctioned weigh-offs must now carry annual certification, following the disputed 2025 result in which the winning 1,842-pound pumpkin was later found to have been weighed on a scale “calibrated for gravel, not glory.”

The dispute consumed the pumpkin community for months. Runner-up grower Hank Delmore’s 1,839-pound entry lost by three pounds — “three pounds, on a scale last serviced during the previous administration,” Delmore said. A recount on a certified scale put his pumpkin at 1,847 and the winner at 1,841, but the results stood, because, as the weigh-off committee ruled, “the moment had passed and the ribbons had been given out.”

“A pumpkin weigh-off without a certified scale is just a group of people guessing near a large vegetable,” said calibration chief Maria Santos, whose office certifies scales using a set of 500-pound test weights she transports in a trailer labeled “OFFICIAL MASS.” Certification costs $75 and includes a tamper-evident seal and what Santos calls “the sternest sticker in agriculture.”

The office will also standardize weigh-off procedure: pumpkins must be weighed “dry-ish,” free of “strategic mud,” and lifted by certified straps, not “whatever chain was in the truck.” The 2025 winner’s grower, reached for comment, said he “accepts the new rules and maintains the old victory.”

Delmore has already entered this year’s contest with a pumpkin his neighbors describe as “structurally alarming.” “It’s going to be weighed on a certified scale if it kills me,” he said. “Ideally not literally. But the scale will be certified.”

Santos’s “OFFICIAL MASS” trailer — carrying the 500-pound test weights used for scale certification — has become a weigh-off attraction in its own right, with children posing beside the weights and one grower asking to have his pumpkin photographed “next to the official mass, for scale, literally.” Certification day, held last weekend at the fairgrounds, processed 22 scales in six hours; three failed and were “sent home with a list and a look,” Santos said. The $75 fee includes the tamper-evident seal, the stern sticker, and “Santos’s personal guarantee that your scale knows what a pound is.”

Delmore’s entry — the “structurally alarming” pumpkin his neighbors have been watching swell all summer — is currently estimated at 1,900 pounds “by eyeball, which is not a certified method,” Santos cautioned. The 2025 champion, for his part, has entered again, setting up what the local paper is calling “the rematch of the century, vegetable division.” Both pumpkins will be weighed on certified scales, lifted by certified straps, “dry-ish and free of strategic mud.” “May the best pumpkin win,” Santos said. “And may the scale be beyond reproach.”