Farm spooks up for Halloween as UK's largest pumpkin festival gets underway

When it comes to diversification Farmer Copleys is carving out a niche. The farm has been running its annual pumpkin festival for seven years and has seen a rapid rise in popularity every Halloween.
 
Visitors are welcomed to pick their own pumpkins from a variety of different colours and sizes straight from the field. Rob Copley, director of Farmer Copleys, said he got the idea whilst visiting farms in America and has since gone on to  create the biggest pumpkin festival in the UK.
 
The farm, near Pontefract in West Yorkshire, has grown 90,000 pumpkins this year from 25 different varieties. Rob said that they ‘don’t wholesale anything’ with 99 per cent of the crop sold at the farm gate as pick your own and the remaining one per cent being sold through the farm shop.