Harvest Host offers an easy option for farms to dip a toe into agritourism
With fields of flowering cover crops, orchards filled with bird song, and herds of cattle munching their way through the knee-high pasture, biological farms are a place of beauty. Increasingly, people looking for unique travel opportunities are visiting and staying on farms. While travelers get the chance to experience rural life and fresh food, farmers gain economic resilience through income diversification. According to the USDA, agritourism revenue more than tripled between 2002 and 2017.
Harvest Host is an online platform that links RVers with farmers offering overnight stays. RVers pay an annual fee to access Harvests Host’s directory of farms. Guests are not charged any camping fees, but they are encouraged to purchase goods from the farm as a way of saying thank you. It is free to list a farm on the site. When farmers sign up, they create a profile with information like maximum nights available, maximum rig size, and a description of the farm. RVers looking to visit will request an available date range using a calendar on the farm’s profile, and farmers can choose to accept the request.
Dan and Julie Perkins of Perkins’ Good Earth Farm in De Motte, Indiana, have been hosting with Harvest Host since April of 2021. They operate a year-round organic vegetable CSA with 175 members. They also have a farmstand and a commercial kitchen where they make soups and salads. When they first heard about Harvest Host, they realized that the grass lane along their windbreak would work well as an RV site.
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