A TV Station Interviewed Me About My Pumpkin Farm for 40 Seconds. By Morning, 9 Million People Had Watched It, and 600 Women Were Lined Up at My Gate

The news crew gave me forty seconds.

They come out every October. Channel 25 out of Peoria. A reporter, a cameraman, a nice shot of the pumpkins in the field and a quick quote from the farmer for the six o’clock news.

The farmer is me.

This year, the reporter was a young woman named Kelsey, about twenty-five, very peppy. She pointed the microphone at me.

“So, Kip, what makes a perfect pumpkin?”

I was tired. I’d been up since four. I had dirt on my face, my flannel was ripped at the elbow, and I had a thirty-pound Howden pumpkin on my shoulder.

I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Patience,” I said. “You can’t rush a pumpkin. You give it good soil, a lot of sun, and you show up every single day. Same as anything you love.”

Then I put the pumpkin in the wagon and walked away.

That was it.

I’m Kip Hollander. I’m 46, never married, and I grow eighty acres of pumpkins and a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans on my family’s farm outside Morton, Illinois, the self-proclaimed Pumpkin Capital of the World.

My mother says I’m a hopeless case. My sister says I’m “emotionally unavailable.” The last woman I dated said I was “married to the farm,” and she wasn’t wrong.

The segment aired at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday.

At 6:15, somebody posted the clip online.

At 6:30, it had a thousand views.

By Wednesday morning at 5 a.m., when I walked out to feed the dogs, it had nine million.

And there were cars in my parking lot.

A lot of cars.