It’s late morning, mid-July, and a blazing sun beats down on a field of watermelons at Hales Farms on the south side of Salisbury. A group of seasonal workers, sweat pouring down their foreheads from beneath worn ball caps, stoops among the rows of melons, hacking at vines with long knives. Some of them form fire bucket lines, and pass the watermelons along, one by one, loading them into three school buses—roofs cut away and seats gutted to make room for their ripe cargo.

When each bus is loaded with approximately 800 watermelons they rumble down the road in convoy formation and pull into Hales Farms’ “packing shed,” an 8,000-square-foot, open-air warehouse. There, the buses idle as the watermelons are removed, placed onto a conveyor belt, and packed by hand into white bins proudly advertising, “Grown in Maryland & Delaware.” Forklifts zip here and there, stacking pallets three bins high, as tractor-trailers back into the loading dock. 

Inside the office, Will Hales, a third-generation grower, 34, sits at his desk juggling a cell phone, land-line, and fax machine, all of which seem to go off at the same time—nonstop. He politely apologizes. “It’s kinda busy around here,” he says, offering a cold bottle of water. Will’s father, Donald, sits in an easy chair, shaking his head. “Man, I wanna get out of here when all the phones is a-ringing. It’s pretty hectic.” Looking over at his son, Donald says, “He does a good job of keeping it straight. I can’t do it.” He excuses himself and heads into the warehouse, getting behind the wheel of a forklift.

Donald started Hales Farms in 1955, and today the operation annually harvests between 18 million and 20 million pounds of watermelon from 350 acres of a 3,000-acre farm, which also produces corn, soybeans, wheat, and tomatoes. On a busy day, as many as 17 tractor-trailers visit Hales’ packing shed, hauling away up to 40,000 pounds of watermelon each.

Perhaps surprisingly, Delaware and Maryland are major players in the watermelon industry. In 2008, of the 44 states that produce watermelon, Delaware and Maryland ranked in the top 10 based on product value, generating a combined $26.4 million, while producing more than 11 million watermelons. Impressive, considering that the bulk of regional watermelons are yielded from just a few thousand acres in Dorchester, Caroline, and Wicomico counties on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Sussex County, Del.

In Laurel, Del., Travis Hastings, age 30, grows 120 acres of watermelon on his family’s farm. Like Will Hales, Travis is a third-generation grower. Seated in a GMC pickup, Travis surveys one of his fields and reflects on being part of an agricultural fabric that goes deeper than simply tilling the land. “The watermelon industry and growing watermelons—it’s more important to people around here than just making money. It’s definitely a certain kind of culture. It’s a tight-knit group. Pretty much everyone who is doing it, their father was doing it, their grandfather was doing it, and it’s been passed on from generation to generation.” 

In the 1950s, Maryland and Delaware farmers, recognizing the economic importance of watermelons, formed the Maryland-Delaware (Mar-Del) Watermelon Association, bringing growers, buyers, and vendors together to better promote this specialty crop. Donald Hales and Travis Hastings’ late father, John, were founders of the organization, which today tops 138 members. 
With the support of the Maryland and Delaware Departments of Agriculture, the Mar-Del Watermelon Association started a branding campaign in 2007. Growers began labeling their watermelons with stickers, clearly identifying where they were grown, and shipping them in bins with the Mar-Del logo and slogan: “Mar-Delicious Watermelons: The original summertime treat.”  “The Eastern Shore is known for poultry and seafood. There’s been a lot of ignorance over the years with watermelon,” says Will Hales. “As far as your average consumer, they might live in Annapolis or Baltimore and not even know that the watermelon was grown an hour and a half away.”

The campaign has been successful, thus far, particularly with national supermarket chains in the area. Safeway, Food Lion, and Whole Foods, to name a few, all carry the Mar-Delicious brand when in season (mid-July to mid-Sept-ember) and prominently display the white bins in their produce sections.

Each year, the Mar-Del Watermelon Association crowns a watermelon queen who serves as an ambassador and travels to other state watermelon conventions throughout the United States, as well as making appearances at local parades, grocery stores, and schools.

On a breezy afternoon last August, the 2008 Mar-Del Watermelon Queen, 21-year-old Christina Gallant, a Hartly, Del., native, along with the National, Alabama and Florida queens, were all on hand at a promotional event at the Annapolis City Dock. The queens, dressed in princess-like dresses with crowns and white sashes, attracted a crowd by giving out free slices of watermelon and presiding over a seed-spitting contest. Gallant even gave out a few kisses to admiring girls and boys while spreading the gospel of sweet and healthy homegrown produce. “Besides the safety and security of consuming local food—knowing where it comes from—you’re helping out your neighbor ... and really, it’s going to taste better,” she says.

Seed-spitting contests may be an endangered event, however, as seedless melons account for the vast majority of melons grown these days.
Donald Hales was one of the first farmers on the East Coast to plant seedless watermelons 30 years ago. “I really thought in the early ‘80s it was the way to go. I’d grown watermelons all my life. We grew a lot of them old kind, like Jubilee and Charleston Grey. There were seeds in all of them. I thought it was wonderful when the seedless came along.”

“Seedless watermelon is all anybody wants nowadays,” says Will, who notes his farm’s melon crop is almost 95 percent seedless.

Seeded watermelons or non-edible, grapefruit-sized “pollenizer” melons are still necessary to grow seedless melons, however, because the female watermelon (seedless) needs the pollen from the male’s flowers. The whole business of sexing watermelons is a complicated venture involving thousands of shipped-in honey or bumble bees that work to pollinate the watermelon blooms every spring. From planting, which begins in late April, to harvest, it takes a watermelon anywhere from 75 to 90 days to mature. 

With so many variables at play, watermelon can be a risky crop to invest in. “It seems like from the day you plant them you are fighting something,” says Denny Reid, 34, who grows 350 acres of watermelon, in addition to a variety of other crops, in Rhodesdale, Md. “Disease, bugs, rain—two years ago we had major floods that wiped out probably half our crop.”

Travis Hastings agrees. “Not everyone wants to do it. It’s labor intensive; it’s risky.”

Risky or not, for Mar-Del growers, watermelons are a way of life—sometimes in more ways than one. If it weren’t for watermelons, Will Hales may have never met his wife, Candice, the 2005 Alabama and 2006 National Watermelon Queen. They celebrated their second wedding anniversary this April.

For Donald Hales, who turned 70 this year, the proudest part of all of this watermelon business is that his son is following his footprints through the fields. “If it wasn’t for him I’d quit, because I’m getting old and tired.”

After all these years, does Donald still enjoy watermelon?

“Do I? I love ‘em to death. I get tired, but I still love my watermelon. Ain’t nothing like it, especially to cut that thing on a morning after you had dew and dampness on it all night long. There’s nothing better than to sit down and eat a half one of ‘em.” nCL

Freelancer Jason Tinney also loves a good melon.