The neighbors were fine with apple picking and toy tractors. Then zombies swarmed the pumpkins and the zoning officer wanted a word.
Agritourism was supposed to be a profit bonanza for Tabora Farms, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and other family-owned U.S. farms that have jumped on the rural land-use trend. Instead, some are running into homeowner gripes and legal bills while homebuilders, eager to turn fields into luxury subdivisions, circle with offers of quick-and-easy riches.
In New York, farmers say their cows and horses can’t handle a wedding barn’s fireworks. In one of America’s wealthiest suburbs, outside Washington, D.C., one farm’s bid for recreational activities has dragged for more than three years. A Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, couple, appealing an order to stop renting a camping tent on their 42 acres, are caught between a state government that hails non-traditional uses of farmland and local authorities trying to balance the demands for revenue and rural tranquility.
The biggest growth industry in the rural U.S. is outdoor entertainment, which includes agritourism, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Yesteryear, tourists may have paid for apple-bobbing and costume parades. Now, wine tastings, for-fee fishing and ziplines are a hit. So are artillery-grade cannons that turn pumpkins into surface-to-air missiles traveling 600 miles (966 kilometers) per hour.
At Tabora Farms, some neighbors are unhappy about seasonal “haunted” cornfields and paintballs-versus-zombies skirmishes in the pumpkin patch. On autumn weekend nights, visitors speed down country byways and turn cars around in their driveways, they say, and their screams and laughter shatter the quiet.
“It used to be a really lovely corner but now the place is like being next door, quite honestly, to a Wawa,” said Robert McGraw, a 90-year-old corn and soybean farmer, referring to a convenience-store and gasoline chain widespread in Bucks County.
Staying Open
More than half of U.S. states have laws regulating agritourism and its offshoot, agritainment, according to the National Agricultural Law Center, a Fayetteville, Arkansas, service run by the state university. Colorado employs an agritourism director, and state universities in California and Massachusetts run seminars on the topic geared to farm owners.
In New York’s Finger Lakes region, livestock owners are pleading with Lansing town officials to ban fireworks at Dutch Harvest Farm, where a 7,000-square-foot wedding barn is under construction. The noise can spook animals in their fields, leading them to break through fences, they argue, saying even those indoors have potential to panic and injure themselves.
Owner Laura Huizinga, though, said that fireworks are part of the country experience. She described herself and her husband as “mom-and-pop people” with newborn twin boys, trying to make a living by offering a homespun alternative to over-the-top wedding mills.
“We just want to be good neighbors, be a part of the community,” said Huizinga, 32.