PLAINFIELD — Longing to experience farm labor, north of 2,000 patrons come any given fall weekend to Riverview Farm to pick apples, berries, flowers and pumpkins.
While the Plainfield farm has been doing pick-your-own since the 1980s, its popularity has exploded in recent years, with waves of visitors coming from near and far to experience the farm, which sits along the Connecticut River.
“I don’t think any of us would’ve ever imagined it would grow into what it is now,” said Amy Franklin, who orchestrates the Riverview’s “dinner in the orchards” evenings and is the daughter of the farm’s founders, Paul and Nancy Franklin.
Similar offerings — including on-farm dinners, pick-your-own offerings, farm-themed festivals and the like — are broadly defined as “agritourism” and have recently been cropping up in communities throughout the Upper Valley.
“Agritourism is having a moment,” said Lisa Chase, an extension professor at the University of Vermont and the director of the Vermont Tourism Research Center.
From 2002 to 2022, the number of New Hampshire farms participating in some form of agritourism grew from 16 to 156, according to 2007’s and 2022’s USDA Census of Agriculture. Agritourism revenue similarly grew from $265,000 in 2002 to $4.54 million in 2022, the census reported.
In the same time frame, Vermont farms participating in some form of agritourism grew from 57 to 323, according to the censuses from 2007 and 2022. The earnings from Vermont agritourism grew from $2.88 million in 2002 to $4.67 million dollars in 2022, the censuses reported.
This trend extends to the rest of the country as well.
In 2022, U.S. farms generated $1.26 billion in income from agritourism services, an increase of 12.4% from 2017 after adjusting for inflation, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture.
The industry has sprouted both from farmers looking for other income sources and non-farmers looking for experiences to reconnect them with their food, Chase said.
The growth of agritourism marks a change in agriculture from production to consumption.
Farms have shifted from simply producing food to selling experiences.
With fewer people farming than ever, there is a growing divide between people and their food systems.
“It’s true that people have become quite separated from agriculture over time,” said Gail McWilliam Jellie, an agricultural program assistant with UNH Extension who was formerly the director of agricultural development at the NH Department of Agriculture.
For many today, “agriculture is mysterious,” said McWilliam Jellie.
While someone might see fields, animals and maybe even a tractor, “they don’t really have a clear understanding of how all that works together,” McWilliam Jellie said.
Shift from a distraction to a staple
One of the region’s earliest forms of agritourism came during Vermont and New Hampshire’s booming ski industry of the 1980s, Chase said.
Armed with metropolitan mindsets and disposable income, droves of ski-hungry Bostonians and New Yorkers would come to the rural region in need of lodging.
Beth Kennett, the owner of the once-struggling Liberty Hill dairy farm in Rochester, Vt., opened up her farmhouse to these ski tourists, she said. Although she had no thought of agritourism, she began to notice that people were coming specifically to meet the cows, learn about the farm and eat home-cooked meals.
The farm, now “Liberty Hill Farm & Inn,” and has 4.8 stars on TripAdvisor.com, including an 5-star review in April from “Lilacslover” of Boston that reads, “I was struck by the fact that this was a REAL farm.”
But before agritourism really began to bear fruit, Kennett got “a lot of skepticism,” Chase said, “not only from the people running the (Vermont) Department of Tourism, but also from people in agriculture, thinking, ‘Oh, this is a distraction from the serious business of production.’ ”
But in the last decade, there’s been more recognition in Vermont and New Hampshire that farmers need different streams of revenue, and the general public needs (and is willing to pay for) farm education — “and agritourism provides both of those,” Chase said.
In the past few years, the Upper Valley’s agritourism industry has blossomed.
“We’ve hit a tipping point this year,” Emily Reiss said in response to the hundreds of people attending Fledge Fest, a local food, music and arts festival that started four years ago.
Reiss is the co-owner of Fledgling Farmstead in Tunbridge, which grows a variety of crops and hosts the festival on its grounds.
Aidan O’Keefe, a 30-year-old data analyst for the music streaming platform Soundcloud, drove just under 300 miles from Manhattan for Fledge Fest.
While the farm doesn’t make much from the festival itself, it introduces more people to the farm. This helps spread the farm’s Community Shared Agriculture, or CSA, through which consumers pay for a subscription of regular deliveries of produce and other farm products.
The festival connects like-minded people with “unique and exciting” events based around local food, which can result in more people signing up for the farm’s “core economic engine” — its 22-subscriber CSA, said Evan Reiss, 39, co-owner of Fledgling Farmstead.
The farm also has a camping site, which often compels campers to purchase veggie-bundles from the farm.
But even with these various streams of income, the farm isn’t able to sustain its owners.
“But the reality is that we have other jobs,” said Reiss, who works as a cabinet maker in the off-season.
Other, more regular events are also springing up in the region, such as Crossmolina Farm’s weekly summer pizza nights at the Corinth farm.
The event began 11 years ago as a side-offering for people picking up their CSAs, said co-owner Margaret Loftus at a pizza night in July that drew around 150 patrons. The personal pizzas are provided alongside local craft beers and ciders.
Loftus, a former public defender, and her husband, Jonathan, a former engineer, left Brooklyn in 2006 for the 40-acre farm, which produces all the pizza toppings, including bell peppers, spinach and sausage.
Bill Fischelis attended one of these nights in July. Now, 62 and living in the greater Boston area, Fischelis’ family owns a farm in Strafford and he grew up going to events such as the West Fairlee chicken barbecue.
He has noticed an increase of people who live in Vermont, but hail from other places like Boston and New York.
While 40 years ago, the vast majority of patrons would have originally been from Vermont, “20% of the people here are native Vermonters,” Fischelis said.
This influx of outside patrons gives farms the difficult decision between maintaining their grassroots, community-minded events or expanding with the growth.
“I think it’s really difficult to grow for these farm businesses,” said Barnard resident Jeremy Park, 41, who regularly plays guitar at Crossmolina’s pizza nights.
“You always want to stay authentic and small, (but) growth is inevitable,” Park said at Flying Dog Farm, which drew 350 people to its last burger night in September.
At the Tunbridge farm that began in 2020, patrons can watch burger-to-be cattle graze as they cozy up in a blanket on the farm’s grass.
Beginning in 2009, Park also farmed vegetables for Feast and Field, one of the region’s earliest events geared for agritourists. While Feast and Field has grown beyond its initial grassroots identity — with bigger bands, crowds and advertising — smaller events such as the pizza nights are filling its void, Park said.
Image-focused marketing
Rather than producing food, many farms now focus on selling experiences.
While Paul Franklin started Riverview’s pick-your-own as a marketing tool to draw people in, production has become secondary.
“Now everything seems to have flipped on its head,” Paul Franklin said. “Getting fresh produce, I think, is still a goal for a lot of people who come here, but most people are coming for an experience, an event.”
Although the farm does some direct-to-consumer sales and some wholesale to Dartmouth College, as much as 90% of its income comes from pick-your-own, he said.
The shift in producing food to selling experiences comes partly as a result of increased disposable income and population in the region.
New Hampshire’s median household income adjusted for inflation has increased from just under $70,000 in 1984 to $111,000 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the same period, Vermont’s has risen from $60,000 to $85,000.
And from 1964 to 2024, the population of Vermont has increased from 400,000 to almost 650,000, and in New Hampshire it has grown from 663,000 to 1.4 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Paul Franklin credits the influx of patrons to the interstates, Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, which have contributed to making Hanover and Norwich some of the wealthiest towns in the two states.
A key element of this “Experience Economy,” as B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore wrote in their similarly named 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review, is creating an experience that people are willing to pay for.
Marketing these types of events comes partly from the farms themselves as they use social media for promotion.
Riverview began its dinner in the orchard evenings in 2018 as a way for Amy Franklin’s sister to grow her design portfolio for the wedding industry, Amy Franklin said.
“It is absolutely something that is image friendly,” she said. “And social media is a visual medium for sure. I mean, that’s how I do most of my marketing for it now.”
A stroll through the orchard often will often yield several selfie-takers participating in Instagram and Facebook culture, she said.
Paul Franklin, who has witnessed Riverview change from a small-scale berry producer into a farm-to-Instagram-feed attraction, expressed his distaste for the new form of agriculture.
“Reminds me how much people today hype up what was so ubiquitous 50 (to) 80 years ago,” he said.
“I think if you ask anybody my age in any rural part of the country, they’ll say, ‘We liked it back when we were younger,’ ” he said. “But we can’t change it.”