The forklift did the hard part. On Saturday, Aug. 22, at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, a pumpkin the size of a small car was lowered onto a scale in front of a crowd of fairgoers, and the number that came up rewrote the record book: 1,882.4 pounds.
The grower was Josh Monin of Caneyville, in Grayson County, and the win at the Kentucky State Fair's annual Largest Pumpkin and Watermelon Contest was an all-time fair record, state fair officials said. It topped last year's champion — also Monin's — by about 261 pounds. His prize was calculated the old-fashioned way, at two dollars per pound, which came to $3,764.80.
From 'Blockhead' to the record book
Monin is not a newcomer to the scale. He has been growing giant pumpkins since around 2016, and he won this same contest in 2022 with a 1,508.2-pound squatty specimen he called "Blockhead," collecting a dollar a pound from then-Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles. Back then he explained the secret in one word. "Genetics," Monin told the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, describing how some giants grow tall and some grow wide — and how the wide ones tend to "go heavy."
In 2025 he returned with a 1,621-pounder and dethroned the previous fair record holder, Dwight Slone of Floyd County, whose 1,663-pound gourd had stood since 2021. Then, a month after that fair, the Monin family pushed things further still: a 2,209-pound pumpkin, named "Spike" by their young son Bennett, which set a Kentucky record for the largest pumpkin ever grown in the commonwealth. Monin had hinted it was coming. "This is not even my biggest," he said after the 2025 fair win, according to local station K105. "I've got one at home that should be bigger."
Growing one of these is less gardening than daily devotion. The family plants in late April and, by Monin's own account in past years, spends two to three hours a day on the vines — soil tests and amendments, drip irrigation, shade to keep the skin from hardening in direct sun. His wife, Whitney, an agronomist and his high school sweetheart, is part of the operation, and so is Bennett, who handles the naming.
A watermelon champion, too
Monin wasn't the only repeat winner Saturday. Nick McCaslin of Hancock County took the largest watermelon title with a 245.7-pound melon, good for $500. He won last year, too, with a slightly heavier 258-pounder — proof that even in the giant-produce business, some seasons are just cooler and wetter than others.
Why does a pumpkin on a scale draw a crowd? Because the giant-produce contest is one of the last places at a modern fair where the whole story is visible in a single object. Nobody can fake 1,882 pounds. It represents four months of pre-dawn watering, a genetic line traded among hobbyist growers, and a family that decided this was how they'd spend their summer evenings.
Both winners were set to remain on display in the West Wing of the Kentucky Exposition Center for the rest of the fair, which ran through Aug. 30 — which means thousands of Kentuckians got to walk past a record and put a hand on it.
Somewhere back in Grayson County, presumably, there are still vines in the ground. Given Monin's track record, the safest bet is that this record has a shelf life of about a year.
