Specialty Pumpkin: Laying the Groundwork for an Emerging Crop and Lucrative Products

Research Objectives

1. Assess potential risks/benefits of specialty pumpkin production and barriers to acceptance.
2. Evaluate pumpkin germplasm lines and cultivars for use as flesh, seeds, and as product ingredients.
3. Determine yield, fruit quality and disease resistance of tropical pumpkin cultivars in the Southeastern U.S. and Puerto Rico in organic and conventional cropping systems and determine phenotypic relationships among nutrition, flavor and fruit size traits in select germplasm.
4. Develop cropping systems for sustainable organic and conventional specialty pumpkin production.
5. Monitor arthropod pests and beneficial insects in specialty pumpkin to design cultural and biological control tactics for organic and conventional systems.

Project Details

This work is supported by Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) project no. LS21-360 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

• Team Members

  University of Florida

  • Geoffrey Meru, Ph.D. (Lead Project Investigator)
  • Jorge Ruiz-Menjivar, Ph.D.
  • Andrew MacIntosh, Ph.D.
  • Carlene Chase, Ph.D.
  • Mickie Swisher, Ph.D.
  • Amy Simonne, Ph.D.
  • Gabriel Maltais-Landry, Ph.D.
  • Oscar Liburd, Ph.D.

  Florida A&M University

  • Alejandro Bolques, Ph.D.

  University of Puerto Rico

  • Angela Ramirez, Ph.D.

  Auburn University

  • Andre da Silva, Ph.D.