Carrot Festival

At the end of the Carrot Festival Parade in Holtville, carrots are handed out to the people along the route. The parade comes down the town’s main thoroughfare on a Saturday morning in February. In 2025 the announcer sang the Holtville Vikings fight song as the high school’s Band of Pride approached. The Holtville Chamber of Commerce runs the festival. Its 80th edition is set for February 4–7, 2027, with the parade and street fair on February 6 and the royalty coronation the week before, on January 29.

Four days around Holt Park

Holt Park lies at the center of Holtville’s town square, shaded by a large variety of trees. The festival takes over the park and the streets around it. The carnival midway runs all four days. In 2026 it stood on West Sixth Street behind the park, with a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a giant swing and carnival games. In 2025 a 20-foot-tall mechanical wheel capped the corner at Sixth Street, and riders entered its tiny metal cages for a thrill ride of a minute or two.

The 2024 schedule shows how the days run. The carnival opened Thursday from 3 to 9 p.m. on Holt Avenue and Sixth Street, with rides, games, student art exhibits, vendors, food trucks, live music and a beer garden. On Friday night the Table 5 Band played the Kickoff Concert on Holt Avenue from 7 to 9:30. Sunday was a last round of rides, booths and carnival food before the carnival packed up and left town.

Saturday runs from sunup to sundown. The Carrot Festival Mile & 5K starts at 7 a.m. In 2019 the morning also held a 4K walk/jog, with some entrants pushing strollers. “The 4K is lovely; you go under the railroad trellis and go by the park – much easier on the feet,” said Rae Polkinhorn of El Centro, running her fifth. The parade followed at 10 in 2024. At noon comes the awards ceremony, where the best-decorated float takes a trophy. After the awards, school drumlines compete in the gazebo at Holt Park. Joel Jacklich, director of the Imperial Valley Symphony, judged it in 2019. “All these drum lines had a clean and good performance,” he said. “It was just the top two had a little more originality and showmanship.”

Through the day the street fair spreads under the park’s trees. Local artisans and community groups keep booths in the park, and food and drink vendors line Holt Avenue from Fifth Street to Sixth. In 2026 the stalls sold tacos, elote cups, baked goods and rice bowls, and booths in the park carried Valentine decorations. In 2025 students from Holtville High School’s FFA raised money for their annual trip by selling bags of produce donated by local farmers. That year’s Saturday came with what the Calexico Chronicle called a mild 70-degree winter breeze.

Mariachi Night, added in 2024, carries Saturday into the evening. The first one featured Mariachi Acero Del Valle from 5 to 7 p.m. In 2025 the stage held soloist Santi Alvarez, Lincoln Elementary School, Mariachi Orgullo Nacional and BUHS Folklorico. Mariachi de Acero del Valle and the dancers Las Flores del Valle headlined.

Earlier in the week, at least in 2019, came a cooking contest. Finalists brought carrot dishes to a sweepstakes at the Holtville Civic Center. Maxine Bonneau won $300 with a golden chicken pot pie. Mari Lyn Pemberton took second with chili-roasted tacos, substituting carrots for meat. Mayor David Bradshaw placed third with a “copper pennies casserole.” Winter visitors from Edmonton, Alberta, and Quebec City came to taste. “The people here keep us coming down … but mostly it’s the weather,” said Eric Engman of Edmonton, on his 10th trip.

Floats, bands and old tractors

Each year’s parade follows a theme. The 2025 theme was “Hop on the Carrot Express!”, and floats came down the street as locomotives, some filled with people and others made of people. Festival coordinator Yvette Rios, also Holtville’s city clerk, said the theme honored William F. Holt, “credited with being the father of the Imperial Valley because he helped fund the railroad coming to the Imperial Valley in the early 1900s when it seemed unthinkable.” In 2026 the theme was “Hoppily Ever After.” A tractor carried a heart filled out in carrots, and another float came decked in pink and white. Brian Cesada, a Holtville resident, rode in it: “I got a unique experience — I was the carrot at the parade.”

The 2025 parade was led by Grand Marshal Margaret Strahm, a community leader and advocate for suicide prevention. Local law enforcement, church groups and community organizations followed her, then the school bands. The newly crowned court waved from the back of a restored classic car: Queen Aileen Salorio, 16, Princess Grace Cerda, 12, and Junior Princess Avery Sutter, 11. In 2019 the grand marshal was Virginia Munger, 101, who had come from New Mexico in 1925 by way of the Old Plank Road. “I was so excited, I thought they’d made a mistake, bless their hearts,” she said. “I think they just went down their list and got the oldest one.” That year the parade drew 84 entries, including car clubs and equestrian groups.

Farm machinery has long had a place in the line. A 2010 account in Farm Collector describes a forklift leading off with two pallets of carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. A 1936 John Deere Model D, a parade regular since its restoration in 1990, headed the antique tractors. Nancy Caywood drove the 1953 Massey-Harris 44 she had restored with her parents, husband, son and grandchildren. Ernie Strahm and his sons drove tractors gathered from farms the family had bought out. “I just couldn’t watch them rust away,” Strahm said. That parade closed with the lights and sirens of the fire department, and the tractors were then lined up on the streets around the town square.

A crop report in 1947

By the account in a 2022 Holtville Tribune history, the festival began in 1947. Jim Osborne, secretary-manager of the Chamber of Commerce, was reading the Department of Agriculture’s Crop Report and Railcar Statistics. He noticed that Holtville had shipped more carrots the past season than any other place in the United States, and that around 11,000 acres of carrots were planted each year in the Imperial Valley. It was too late to plan much for 1947, so that first Carrot Carnival was small: a visit by Bugs Bunny and a float in Calexico’s Desert Cavalcade parade. On the float rode a giant carrot, Jay Sherlock in a Bugs Bunny costume, and seven young women. One of them, Betty Jo Gibbs, recalled the ride for the 50th festival’s program: “We tossed bunches of carrots to the crowd … I remember wondering that someone might get hurt if they got hit on the head.”

An older Tribune history, reprinted in 2019, dates the Carrot Carnival from February 1948. It spells the founder’s name Osborn. George C. Moore, then chamber president, credited the idea to him alone. Osborn “had the idea that Holtville was the biggest carrot producer in the world,” and found the facts to back him up. A Chamber release puts the first carnival at Feb. 6–7, 1948. Rosie Allegranza, the Chamber’s executive manager in 2022, said the first Carrot Parade of 1947 came a year before the festival itself.

The 1948 carnival held two parades, one of floats and one made entirely of children. Every grade of the Holtville Grammar School marched in it, the school now named Emmett S. Finley Elementary. That year also brought the first carrot cooking contest, the first Citizen of the Year Award, a horse show and a gymkhana. Allegranza said the city paid Warner Brothers for the use of Bugs Bunny that year. In the Carrot Crate Coaster Contest, a race like a soap box derby, boys built their own racers. It drew 35 entries in front of the Motor Inn, and the winner, Sydney Jones, was hailed as a conquering hero. Volunteers cooked hundreds of pounds of ham for a barbecue in a big tent along the river west of town and served more than 5,000 people. It followed a Holtville habit: from 1909 to 1915 the town had thrown huge free barbecues. In 1949, three tents in the City Recreation park displayed over a million dollars of merchandise from businessmen across the Valley. Joe Maggio gave away a truckload of small carrots at the Desert Cavalcade to advertise the carnival.

Old festival programs, kept at Holtville’s Meyer Memorial Library, track how the themes changed. In 1975 the festival marked Holtville’s naming the year before as sister city to Chiang Chun Hsiang, the biggest carrot-growing center in Taiwan. “This year’s festival wishes to acknowledge a friendly relationship to our sister city,” wrote chamber president J. Ace Puckett. Then came the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, and in 1979 Mickey Mouse’s 50th birthday. The 1979 program also carried an article by former Tribune publisher Quentin Burke on a geothermal test plant twelve miles from town. In 1999 the theme was “24 Carrot Community.” Chamber president Mark Schmidt wrote: “As the century draws to a close, may the fond memories of this year’s Carrot Festival be paramount with you well into the next millennium.” The 2024 theme returned to the pun: “24 Carrot — We Struck Gold!”

Queens from Holtville and beyond

The first Carrot Carnival Queen, in 1948, was Charlotte Von Flue, remembered as “a cute Swiss miss.” She rode in that year’s second parade and later became Mrs. Gene Johnson. She won against girls from El Centro, Calipatria, Calexico, Westmorland and Holtville. By Allegranza’s account, the queen contest was first opened to girls from cities other than Holtville in 2019. Courtney Walker of Imperial won that year, the first non-Holtville resident to take the crown. Selling raffle tickets door to door for the coronation banquet, Walker knocked at Allegranza’s own house without knowing whose it was. “To be from another town and go door-to-door and sell (raffle) tickets — giving her little speech — just amazed me,” Allegranza said.

Alexis Piper, crowned in 2020, held the title until February 2022 because the pandemic paused public events. She and her court, Princess Lexee Roeseler and Junior Princess Brytni Valenzuela, stood masked outside Holtville businesses with signs. They also drove holiday “Carrot-vans” through town. On Feb. 4, 2022, at the Holtville Swiss Club, she crowned Arianna Venegas. “It’s actually kind of sad (for me) to be passing it on,” Piper said. “It’s going to be kind of hard to let go but I’m excited that other people get the same opportunity I did.”