October is not a pleasant month to be a pumpkin. In the best scenario, your insides are scraped into a can. In the worst, your face is sliced open, a candle is placed inside your skull, and you wind up rotten, or smashed by rowdy trick-or-treaters.

And October 2005 is a particularly bad month, too, if you are a pumpkin farmer. At Dykeman’s Farm in Pawling, after irrigating all the way through the dry summer, Beth Dykeman and her husband, Wright, found their selling season spoiled by rain.

Like many other New York farmers, the Dykemans rely on families and tour groups – “agritourists” looking for “agritainment” – who visit on the beautiful autumn days leading up to Halloween. There haven’t been many of those days this month, and weekends have been particularly wet.

“We had a good crop of pumpkins, but we can’t sell our pumpkins if we don’t have customers,” Mrs. Dykeman said. “It’s been a very, very discouraging season because it was very dry all summer, and when we didn’t want rain, it came. Pumpkins are one of our bigger crops, so we count on having a good October.”

In the past two decades, many farms in New York State have started hosting pick-your-own activities, hayrides, petting zoos, and other forms of agritainment during harvest time. Relying on direct-to-consumer transactions, instead of just wholesale sales to supermarkets, has helped farmers diversify. But it has also increased their vulnerability to bad fall weather.

For farmers with irrigation, it’s been a great year for growing pumpkins, partly because of the hot summer sun. But it’s been a bad selling year for everyone.

The effects trickle – or rather, pour – down to wholesalers as well, since wholesale farms supply some of the squash that are “picked” at pick-your-own fields.

On Columbus Day weekend, often the busiest three days of the year for pick-your-own farmers, the rain kept many New Yorkers indoors. Only half a dozen cars were parked at Race Farm in Blairstown, N.J., during the holiday weekend, said Ryan Race, who sells his produce at the Union Square Greenmarket.

After disease rotted some of the squash and peppers, Mr. Race thought his farm wouldn’t have enough pumpkins to satisfy customer demand. He was wrong.

“Rain, rain, rain,” Mr. Race, whose father, Doug, owns the farm said. “After these rains and people not showing up, we have more pumpkins than we know what do with.”

Despite the weather difficulties, agritainment has been a boon for New York farmers. Tourist attractions add value to the pumpkin-buying experience, which allows farmers to demand higher prices, the director of the state field office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, Stephen Ropel, said.

While the number of vegetable farms in New York State fell 17% between 1997 and 2002, the number of pumpkin growers increased 23%, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

“To eliminate the middle man and be able to sell directly to consumers, and to invite them to their farms, that’s been a huge draw and improvement for our farmers,” a spokeswoman for the state agriculture department, Jessica Chittenden, said.

Even though three states grow more pumpkins, New York produces the highest-value crop in the country. New Yorkers are willing to pay about 31 cents a pound, so 100 pounds of pumpkins costs $31 here, more than twice as much as in California, where 100 pounds costs $15.30. Illinois, which grows more pumpkins than any other state, sells them for only $3.46 a pound, because they all end up in cans, Mr. Ropel said.

Farmers also like pumpkins because they’re easy to grow. “You plant them. There’s not a whole lot of maintenance involved in bringing a pumpkin to harvest,” Ms. Chittenden said.

In a year with low demand, however, the plethora of pumpkins can hurt those who depend on them.

Despite his bumper crop, Darcy Pray, of Pray’s Family Farm in Keeseville, said he’ll make less money on pumpkins than he did last year.

“What hurts business a little bit is everybody has a good growing year,” he said, including individuals who grow pumpkins in their backyards. “So they don’t come out to support the farmer.”

The Dykemans are making as much money as last year, but expenses are higher because of irrigation and fuel costs. “Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder for a farmer to make a living,” Mrs. Dykeman said. “Every year we ask ourselves, ‘Why do we do this?'”