Harvest Hosts Connects Family Farms With RV Travelers
Park your wheels in these fields.
Harvest Hosts Connects Family Farms With RV Travelers
Park your wheels in these fields.
Last spring, as the pandemic shuttered small businesses across the country, Dave Putnam began to worry about the future of his Washington lavender farm. Agritourism makes up much of the business at Trinity Gardens, where Putnam and his family grow and sell apples, cherries and other produce in addition to lavender products. And without the weddings they regularly hosted or the usual flow of cars passing by on their way to a nearby amphitheater, visitors to the farm grew less frequent.
Then Putnam’s friend told him about a company called Harvest Hosts, a membership-based club that provides unique experiences for RV travelers. For an annual fee of $99, members have access to camping out at over 2,000 locations in the U.S., many of which are farms and wineries.
Harvest Hosts was originally founded in 2009 by an Arizona couple, Don and Kim Greene. In 2018, the Greenes sold the company to Joel Holland, who had recently finished a two-year RV journey with his wife. When Holland bought the company, Harvest Hosts had around 600 locations and 6,000 members. Today, it boasts 150,000 members, a number that’s expected to grow to 200,000 by the end of this year.
As people have grown more restless at home, without the ability to easily hop on a flight to another country, there’s been a growing interest in domestic travel. As a result, RV sales have boomed. The Recreational Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) has seen record sales since the onset of the pandemic, with RV shipments in February 23 percent higher than the same month last year. RVIA expects RV sales to be headed to their highest levels ever in 2021.
All of those new RVers—who range in age from young couples with shiny Airstream trailers to retirees driving decked-out rides—need places to stay on their cross-country trips. Sure, there are plenty of campsites and truck stops for RVs to park, but why not stay overnight at a more scenic vineyard, orchard or brewery? Holland wants to help match the travelers with small businesses and family farms who need the support.
It doesn’t cost anything for a farm to become a Harvest Hosts location. As long as there’s space on the farm for an RV to park for a night—no hook-ups required—it’s qualified. While Harvest Hosts does not pay locations to welcome RVers, the company does encourage the guests to support their hosts by making purchases during the visit. According to Holland, farms make an average of $13,000 in annual revenue from Harvest Hosts guests. “That may not seem like a ton, but for a lot of mom-and-pop small businesses, it really is helpful,” he says. “We’ve heard touching tributes from hosts who thought they were otherwise going to lose the farm and have to shut down.”
In Pennsylvania, Pam Ellenberger has welcomed fewer than a dozen RVs to Bent Limb Farm, where she raises alpacas, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits and poultry. She signed up to be a host less than six months ago, but her experience with guests has been overwhelmingly positive. “We’ve had really nice people who respected the property and the animals,” she says. “And everybody has bought something. I’ve seen everything from $10 to $500 [in purchases].”
Since becoming a host last June, Putnam has welcomed more than 200 RVs to Trinity Gardens. “It’s really interesting to meet the people that are traveling,” says Putnam. “The majority of people coming through have just had it with the pandemic and decided to hit the road in [an] RV. We even get people who are working remotely as they travel.”
Both farmers plan to continue as hosts, even after the pandemic subsides. “It gives us another chance to talk about why growing your own food is important,” says Ellenberger.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Shelby Vittek, Modern Farmer
April 17, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.
Camping on farmland is common in the UK. Glad to see that it’s picking up here, though it’s a shame that this app is limited to those with RVs. I prefer a more low-key experience without microwaves and generators humming.