Pumpkins, Pints, and Cow Pies

In the green pastures of Enumclaw, Washington, where Mount Rainier looms large in the distance, a quiet agricultural loop is at work, one that ties together cows, compost, giant pumpkins, and pints of seasonal beer. At the center of it all is Krainick Dairy, a multigenerational family farm that’s become an unlikely, yet essential, partner in one of Seattle’s quirkiest fall traditions: the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival.

Elysian Brewing, the Seattle craft beer company behind the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival, is renowned for sourcing many of its ingredients locally, including the pumpkins to make their famous pumpkin ales. After their brewing process is complete, Elysian is left with a watery mash of spent grain, and they’ve found a creative way to dispose of that brewing byproduct. Elysian sends that spent grain to Krainick Dairy, where it’s used as part of the cows’ feed, because it’s rich in nutrients and also contains yeast, which is a natural probiotic for the cows, helping them to digest their food.

“A lot of people think that cows eat grain and hay, but cows can be the ultimate upcyclers of foods that aren’t good for us,” said Leann Krainick, owner of Krainick Dairy. “But they can consume them and then turn them into protein or milk, which is a big, nutritious part of our diet.”

The other thing that cows create, in addition to milk and meat, is manure, and lots of it. At Krainick Dairy, where a herd of 500 milk cows produce more than 14,000 gallons of milk a day, Leann and her family are constantly trying to manage large amounts of manure. For the last few years, they've primarily used an in-vessel composting system that transforms the herd’s waste into a nutrient-rich compost product they call “Scarecrow’s Pride.”

“(The manure) is inside the in-vessel composter for three days, rotating at about 160 degrees,” she says. “And what comes out after that is compost that’s dry and sterile and high in organic matter, which earthworms love, and has a wonderful pH value which is great for vegetables.”

One of the earliest adopters of that compost was Joel Holland, a world champion giant pumpkin grower based in nearby Sumner.

“Joel called me one day about 10 years ago and said, ‘Leann, do you have any compost for my patch?’ And then, after he started using our compost, he set the state record for largest pumpkin. It’s partly because of these cows.”

Joel’s pumpkins are not your typical backyard gourds. They use a specific variety of pumpkin, called the Atlantic Giant, and meticulously care for them each day: shading them from the sun, carefully measuring water, and sometimes moving them with a forklift.

“At the peak of its growth, it actually grows about 40 pounds each day,” he told Washington Grown TV host Val Thomas-Matson when the crew visited in season 12. “We have a plant that covers about 1,000 square feet and has hundreds of leaves, all performing photosynthesis. And what they produce all goes into this one pumpkin.”

Over his 50-year pumpkin-growing career, Joel has raised some record-breakers.

“The most recent world champion pumpkin is the largest pumpkin we’ve ever grown. It was 2,362 pounds,” he said.

When those giant pumpkins are finally ready, Joel and his team use a forklift to load them into trucks to bring down to the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival, where they’re weighed and measured. At the festival, which has become a signature event in Seattle each fall, attendees don’t just drink pumpkin beer, they drink it from a giant pumpkin. After weighing, Joel’s creations are often hollowed out, filled with Elysian beer, and tapped like kegs. The spectacle of beer flowing from a 2,000-pound gourd is part of what makes the festival so beloved, but the story behind the pumpkin is even richer.

“Who would have thought that a beer festival really revolves around cows?” Leann laughs.

Finally, after they’re weighed and celebrated, many of those giant pumpkins find one more purpose: a second trip to Krainick Dairy, this time as a seasonal snack for the cows. “After they’re weighed, most of them go out to Krainick Dairy and get fed to their dairy herd,” Joel said. “Cows just love the giant pumpkins when they’re cut into pieces.”

“It’s not really a nutritious thing,” Leann laughs, “it’s a treat for them. They can make a pretty big dent in that pumpkin in about a half an hour.”

So the cycle continues: Elysian brews beer using locally grown pumpkins — sometimes the same ones Joel raised with compost from Leann’s farm. The grains from brewing head back to Krainick Dairy to nourish the cows. The cows produce manure, which becomes compost, which helps grow the next generation of enormous pumpkins. And some of those pumpkins return again, postfestival, to be fed to the herd. All the while, those cows are producing milk and meat for consumers around the state.

The whole process is more than a closed loop; it’s a symbol of how farms, brewers, and growers in the Pacific Northwest rely on one another. What might look like agricultural leftovers — manure, grain, or a spent pumpkin — is actually the fuel for the next stage of someone else’s work.

Leann says she’s proud of the process. “The fact we can turn it into something that’s useful to grow produce — that’s a win.”