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

There were six hundred women at my gate.

I’m not exaggerating. My sister counted. She stood on the roof of the barn with a coffee and a clicker.

They were from Peoria, Springfield, Chicago, St. Louis. One car had Wisconsin plates. A van from a church group in Indiana. Two women who’d driven all night from Ohio.

They had phones. They had signs. One sign said PATIENCE, I’M SINGLE. Another said I’D LET YOU SHOW UP EVERY DAY.

My mother came out of the farmhouse in her bathrobe, looked at the parking lot, looked at me, and said, “Kip. What did you do?”

“I talked about pumpkins.”

My nephew, who’s sixteen, showed me his phone.

The clip had been cut. Slowed down. Set to a love song. Somebody had added hearts. Somebody else had added a caption.

*The hottest farmer in America said one sentence and I need a cold shower.*

It had been shared by two actresses, a country singer and a morning show in New York.

“Uncle Kip,” my nephew said. “You’re a meme.”

“Is that bad?”

“It depends,” he said, “on how much you like attention.”

I hate attention.

I don’t even like having my picture taken at the DMV.

And it was the middle of harvest. We had eighty acres of pumpkins in the field, forty thousand of them, that had to be picked, washed and loaded onto trucks in the next ten days, for grocery stores in four states. If they weren’t, they’d rot. And the crop insurance doesn’t cover “farmer distracted by internet.”

My crew was six men.

All six had stopped working to stand at the fence and look at the women.

I walked out to the gate. The crowd went silent.

Then it screamed.

My mother, behind me, said very quietly: “Oh, honey.”

I put up my hands. I had no idea what I was going to say. My whole face was burning.

“Ladies,” I said. “I am very flattered. But I have forty thousand pumpkins to pick by next Friday, and I’m about to lose them.”

A woman in the front, about fifty, with a Chicago Cubs cap and a voice like a foghorn, shouted back.

“Then give us some gloves, honey!”