The Watermelon Queen reared back, ready to show off her technique for spitting seeds up to 13 feet.
“Hold your crown so it doesn’t fall off,” said Caroline Allen, the 2025 Mar-Del watermelon queen. “You take a step back, and you lean back, and then you go forward.”
Patooie!
It’s not often I get to interview royalty.
Allen, a college senior from Magnolia, Delaware, was at the Annapolis Rotary Crab Feast promoting this staple of summer tables.
She was among a line of queens — a bevy? — on a mission to get people to eat more watermelon.
“I love a nice seedless watermelon,” said Elaine Mason, the reigning national watermelon queen. “So, there’s five different types of watermelon. Your seeded. Your seedless. Your yellow, your red or your orange. And your minis, your small, personal watermelons.”
Not that anyone needs a good reason to bite into a crunchy slice of cool sweetness. I certainly don’t.
So, instead, I went in search of meaning in something so sublimely everyday. Here’s the hard truth about watermelon dreams.
“We call it a crisis crop,” said Mark Collins, a fourth-generation watermelon farmer who owns DMC Farms in Laurel, Delaware. “It’s always something.”
These are the sweet days for watermelons, or they are for the ones that survive too much rain or too little, bugs and competition from other growers.
According to the National Watermelon Report, 432 million pounds of watermelons came across the border from Mexico in the first 10 days of August.
Before you start shouting “Make American watermelon great again,” U.S. farmers shipped almost four times that number in the same 10 days.
Early in the season, it’s from giants like Georgia, California, Florida and Texas. From July to October, though, Maryland and Delaware watermelons come into their own ripeness.
The two tiny states shipped just 35 million pounds of red-seeded, red seedless and other varieties in early August, with one major advantage over all the other growers — they traveled a shorter distance to market, picked at full flavor because they won’t rot on the road.
Collins pulls watermelon from 200 acres, slaps a DMC Farms label on them and ships them as far away as Maine. They are at stores like Sam’s Club and Walmart.
“We’re the farthest north with enough watermelon to have an economic value,” he said.
Growing them isn’t easy. Heavy rains this spring and summer may have delayed the crop, and harvest numbers so far this summer are far behind last year’s.
Farmers start by outsmarting problems hiding in the soil, from fusarium wilt to Phytophthora, a fungus-like microorganism. They buy expensive seedlings, cultivated from resistant seed and grafted with sprouts of desirable varieties.
A field of dead watermelons is just too sad to think about.
“They just won’t risk it,” said Veronica Yurchak, a specialist with the University of Maryland Extension Agency.
Once those seedlings produce fruit, farmers have to fight the next threat. Bugs — lots of them.
Everything from stripped cucumber beetles to spider mites and aphids love to munch and munch on watermelon, then spread a disease that wilts any left unmunched.
Farmers have long turned to pyrethroids, a class of synthetic insecticides invented 75 years ago that mimic the chemical composition of chrysanthemums, as a solution. They don’t always work anymore.
“On the lower shore, the farmers are starting to see reduced efficacy of pyrethroid insecticides,” Yurchak said.
Get past bugs, and the next challenge is finding someone to harvest melons — by hand.
No one local wants these jobs, so farmers hire guest workers. The wage for picking, packing and moving your crop starts at about $18 per hour.
Legitimate farmers hire workers with H-2A visas, but the competition is intense. Just 1,468 visas went to Maryland last year and another 900 to Delaware — spread across 15,000 farms.
There’s no reliable estimate of the number of immigrants working in Maryland agriculture — just an acknowledgement that it’s more than 1,468.
ICE raids ordered by President Donald Trump have sent many into hiding.
“The problem is, the system is cumbersome,” Collins said. “No president, not this one or the last one, has fixed the problem.”
Farmers are, by nature, self-reliant. They ask for help when they need it, but most often solve their own problems. That may explain why Yurchak, the Maryland extension agent, has struggled to meet the remotest farmers.
“They just keep to themselves,” she said.
Extension agents do help. They identify diseases and bugs, and research weed control and seed grafting.
Trump isn’t making their job easier.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture paid for more than half of all U.S. ag research — until now.
The president is cutting 18% of USDA spending and plans to close its Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Prince George’s County. Scientists there research a variety of problems, including fungus and beetles.
The day I was talking to the queens, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen was asking the Senate to study the closure before a vote.
“USDA has proposed a massive reorganization plan, having done absolutely no due diligence,” the Maryland Democrat said. “They’ve not talked to families or to farmers or to rural communities about it.”
He failed, losing a vote on party lines.
In Annapolis, the watermelon queens were headed off to their next assignment.
For Mason, it was California. For Allen, it was finishing her degree in agricultural finance, with an ambition to take the national crown in February.
The queen is chosen by grower groups based on watermelon knowledge.
Ancient Egyptians ate watermelon, the queens said, and there are 1,200 varieties today. It’s not like wine, though. A watermelon from Sussex County, Delaware, tastes pretty much like one from Knox County, Indiana.
Still, I’d like to see the Moon and Stars, a rare heirloom variety from Japan that neither queen knew about.
They knew what they liked, though: red, crunchy and sweet.
And despite their prowess at spitting, no seeds.
“I just love a nice, traditional, seedless watermelon,” Mason said. “All right?”
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