Hello Hive.

As little as insect invasion can generate alot of losses when you are into commercial pumpkin production.
Most of our pumpkin is grown for sale at the market. Looking at the large farms like this you will see that it is not possible for us to consume all the leaves by ourselves and even sharing with neighbors there is more left for us to make some profit from it. Hence we harvest pumpkin leaves and sale at the local market.
Pumpkin is one of the most expensive vegetables around because of its nutritional value.

If a bunch of vegetables (spinach) cost for $0.26 be ready to buy pumpkin at twice or three times the price of vegetable.

Some times we have a reduction in sale price due to insect or pest invasion. No body will want to buy pumpkin from us when the notice the leaves above.
This is one of the major disaster we experience while growing our pumpkin leaves. Sometimes the experience
is an insect invasion where caterpillars and other insects comes to destroy the leaves. They punch the leaves creating holes.
While other times we experience a bacterial diseases where the leaves get rotten like the ones above.

In the past we have had huge losses from this menace not knowing the cause. Agriculturist were called to help us examine the leaves where they had prescribed a certain chemicals to be sprayed on the leaves.

There is huge potentials available in pumpkin farming and while we only make some extra income from this, our farm neighbors use pumpkin as their major source of income.
They plant this throughout the seasons.
And during the dry season when the ground is dry, we have the small river that runs through the farms which we use for growing dry season vegetables.
Commercial production of pumpkin is a truly profitable business compared to other vegetables I have known.