The rise and rise of the family farm

On any given Saturday at this time of year in south-west Ohio, the Lucas Brothers Fall Festival is the place to be.

There’s a hayride into the woods, an inflatable obstacle course, a go-kart track and a corn maze linked to a game that visitors can play on their phones.

At the center of the farm is a quaint barn store filled with jars of jams, honey and other items, and customers lining up for grilled food and drinks. Outside, there’s a wood-burning fire ring billowing smoke into the crisp fall air.

“The barn was initially going to be a machine barn, but then 10 years ago we changed gears, just decided to do a fall thing,” says Susan Lucas, whose husband, Mark, and his brother own the fall fest. The brothers also grow around 1,500 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat, and raise 200 acres of produce every year.

“Definitely, having extra income from the venue helps, the costs are going up, but the price of grain is not. We need that income to pay our bills and support two families,” says Lucas.

With net farming income set to fall by 5.5% after inflation this year, fuel prices at record levels and commodity grain prices stagnant, more farming families are turning to fall festivals and “agritainment” to make a living.

The financial crisis facing family farms is nothing new, with more than 140,000 farms lost in the US from 2017 to 2022.

But in recent years, it has become even worse. Billionaires including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are snapping up millions of acres of agricultural ground, and since the Covid-19 pandemic, farmland values have increased 44%.

Worth an estimated $1.3bn in 2022 or $4.5bn when off-farm and non-edible goods are included, agritourism is increasingly being seen as a lifeline for landowning families.

In the midwest, some farm festivals are reporting record numbers of visitors this fall and for farmers present a fast income revenue stream when, by contrast, payments for crops and cattle can take months, even years, to come through. Some venues have gotten so popular that they’ve had to issue online tickets to manage the crowds.

The boom in income has prompted farmers to double down by building farm stores and even conference and wedding spaces.

In Ohio, the number of farms operating an agritourism business grew 27% in the five years to 2022.

“Agritourism is a way to diversify. However, it takes entirely different skills,” says Lisa Chase, a professor at the University of Vermont and co-author of a US Department of Agriculture-sponsored national study of agritourism published in August. The study found that 75% of participants saw an increase in income after adding an agritourism arm to their farming business.

“Often, it’s the [grown] kids coming back to the farm, but milking cows is not what they want to be doing – they want to be in the education, marketing, hospitality side of things,” says Chase.

The survey of 911 farmers found that in 2024, 24% of participants made from $25,000 to $99,999 in gross revenue from agritourism-related sales and services, while 5% made from $1m to $5m.

For Pam Nelson, who with her husband runs Nelson Produce Farm outside Omaha, Nebraska, agritourism was a route to achieving a long-held dream of running their own farm.

“Neither of us inherited any ground and it’s very hard to get into conventional farming if you don’t have any of those assets,” she says.

She and her husband first grew vegetables for local stores and had two roadside markets before opening their business in 2019.

Now, the farm has experienced extraordinary growth, with close to 100,000 visitors expected this year who come for tulip festivals, a corn maze after dark and a host of other seasonal attractions, such as farm-to-table dinners.

“We hold one every month [from June to October], with different themes and foods,” Nelson says of the latter event.

“We sell tickets in March, and I think this year they sold out in less than an hour.”

Today, the farm employs 70-100 part- and full-time people during its busiest season.

“Every year we have truck and tractor days where we actually give kids truck and combine rides,” she says.

But while agritourism has emerged as an important way to fill in for losses in conventional farming, it’s by no means a silver bullet.

The University of Vermont study found that 45% of participants made less than $25,000 in 2024 from their agritourism ventures.

“One of the biggest challenges we’re facing is getting access to data that shows what the agritourism trends are,” says Claire Whitehouse, a researcher at the University of Vermont and co-author with Chase of the report.

“[The US] Food and Drug Administration figures do not include sales for inedible foods such as pumpkins, wool and decorative gourds.”

What’s more, signs suggest that investment firms may be targeting small farms as a revenue source.

For the past two years, Hidden Valley Orchards, one of the most popular fall festival farms in south-west Ohio, has been operated by a company called Endurance Farm Partners, a limited liability entity run by California-based real estate and business investors with ties to a San Francisco-based investment firm. Emails sent to Endurance Farm Partners by the Guardian asking whether the business owners reside locally were not responded to. The farm had previously been owned by a local business.

For others, growing competition has become a challenge.

“Last year and this year, we noticed a lot more places are opening up and doing what we’re doing,” says Lucas.

“A lot of the local cities and townships are having free fall events, which compete with our market share.”

Still, Lucas says, since the farm has been in her husband’s family for five generations, the fall fest is unlikely to change anytime soon, especially as she sees opening up her farm to the public as a kind of mission.

“Part of the reason it sits on a working farm [is so visitors can connect with rural life],” she says of the business.

“They see the machinery, the barns and the buildings; they see that it’s a lot of work and there’s a lot involved in farming.”