Crop Prices Down, Diesel Up: Why Farms Are Turning to Agritourism to Survive (and the Insurance Trap Nobody Warns You About)

20 hours ago

14 min read

Family walking through a tall corn maze on a working farm with a red barn and pumpkins, as more farms turn to agritourism

When the bushel stops paying the bills, the visitors at your gate can.

The short version

On September 30, 2026, public radio's Marketplace reported that more U.S. farms are adding corn mazes, U-pick and weddings to survive low crop prices and rising costs. The official numbers back it up. The number of Ohio farms earning agritourism income rose 27% between the 2017 and 2022 Censuses of Agriculture, and their agritourism income more than doubled. Nationally, agritourism brought in $1.26 billion in 2022. But insurance costs are climbing and competition is arriving, so the farms that win treat agritourism as a real business from day one.

Fifty straw bales.

That's how a northeast Ohio farm attraction that now draws tens of thousands of visitors a year got started.

Back in the 1990s, the farm market at Patterson Fruit Farm, about half an hour east of Cleveland, got so crowded that the family needed a way to move people out of it. So they piled 50 straw bales outside.

Here's how Bill Patterson, part of the sixth generation to own the farm, described what happened next: "there were hundreds and thousands of kids crawling on 50 straw bales. And we're like, 'Huh, there's something here.'"

There was. Today the farm runs a ticketed Family Fun Fest that Farm Credit reports draws 40,000 to 50,000 people a year. About one in every five revenue dollars now comes from tickets, weddings and pick-your-own apples.

I'm telling you this story because last week one of America's biggest business news programs said out loud what many farmers have been whispering for two years:

Selling the crop alone isn't enough anymore.

In this article I'll show you the official numbers behind that headline, what two Ohio farms are doing about it, and the one expense that can quietly eat your agritourism profits if you're not careful. You'll get the good news and the bad news, because nobody makes a smart decision with half the facts.

When a Business Show Calls Agritourism a "Lifeline," Pay Attention

Marketplace, from American Public Media, isn't a farm magazine. It's a national business program that covers interest rates, jobs and Wall Street. So when it runs a story headlined "Corn mazes, apple picking, and hayrides: More farms are leaning into 'agritourism'," about farms turning to visitors as crop prices fall, the trend has moved from the county fair to the mainstream.

Claudia Schmidt, who teaches agricultural economics at Penn State, summed up the pressure on farms in one sentence:

"Agriculture prices are going down, there are issues with weather, and also input costs are rising."

The reporter's own conclusion was even more direct: "For some farmers, agritourism is a lifeline."

And MaryEllen Hamlin, who manages Derthick's Farm and Corn Maze about 40 minutes southeast of Cleveland, put it in plain farmer language: "Now, more families are needing that extra income to survive."

That isn't a marketing slogan. That's a farm manager describing her balance sheet.

The Squeeze: Why Selling Bushels Alone Stopped Working

Here's the uncomfortable truth about commodity farming. You're a price-taker. You don't set the price of corn. The futures market does. Weather in Brazil does. A trade dispute does. Then the fuel supplier, the fertilizer dealer, the bank and the insurance company send you their bills anyway.

Look at what has happened since 2022.

The 2026 farm squeeze in four numbers: corn at $4.15 a bushel, farm diesel at $5.45 a gallon, $492.8 billion in farm production expenses and negative $495 median farm household income from farming

Corn is the clearest example. According to USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, U.S. farmers received an average of $6.54 a bushel for the 2022 crop. For the 2025/26 marketing year, USDA puts the average at $4.15. That's a 37% drop in three seasons.

Bar chart of the U.S. season-average corn price falling from $6.54 a bushel in 2022/23 to $4.15 in 2025/26, with a USDA forecast of $4.80 for 2026/27

I promised you honesty, so here's the other side. In its September 11, 2026 supply and demand report, USDA raised its forecast for the 2026/27 crop to $4.80 a bushel because a smaller harvest is tightening supplies. That's better. It's also still 27% below 2022. One good month for prices is not the same thing as a good business model.

Meanwhile, the bills went the other way:

Diesel: The average farm diesel price hit $5.45 a gallon on September 4, 2026, up from $3.02 a year earlier. That's about 80% higher, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, and it landed right at harvest, one of the most fuel-hungry times of the year.
Fuel and oil overall: USDA's Economic Research Service expects farm fuel and oil expenses to rise 28.8% in 2026.
Fertilizer: Up 15.3%, according to the same forecast.
Total production expenses: A forecast $492.8 billion in 2026, up $21.2 billion from 2025.

Add it up and USDA expects net farm income to fall to $158.4 billion in 2026. After inflation, that's a 5.5% drop, and it comes even with direct government payments forecast at $47.4 billion.

Now here's the number that should stop you cold. According to the same USDA forecast, the median farm household earned negative $495 from farming in 2025. Negative. Median off-farm income for those households was $94,140.

Read that again. For the typical farm household in America, the farm loses a little money and an off-farm paycheck pays the bills.

Farmer reviewing bills with a calculator at a kitchen table while a combine harvester sits in the field outside, showing rising farm costs

For the median U.S. farm household, farming itself lost money in 2025.

So when farmers go looking for income that doesn't depend on the price of a bushel, they're not chasing a fad. They're doing math. If you want to see how the two models stack up side by side, read my comparison of agritourism and traditional farming income.

Ohio: 27% More Farms Opened Their Gates

Now let's look at what farmers actually did about it.

Every five years, USDA's Census of Agriculture asks every known farm in America how it earned its money, including income from "agri-tourism and recreational services, such as farm tours, hayrides, hunting, fishing, etc." The two most recent censuses cover 2017 and 2022.

Here's what they show for Ohio:

Farms reporting agritourism income rose from 703 to 894, a 27% jump.
Their agritourism income rose from $13.6 million to $32.2 million, up 137% before inflation.
That works out to roughly $36,000 per farm in 2022, up from about $19,300 in 2017.

Ohio agritourism growth chart: farms with agritourism income rose from 703 to 894 and agritourism income rose from $13.6 million to $32.2 million between 2017 and 2022

Penn State's agritourism research team adds more detail. Of Ohio's 76,009 farms, 638 earned income from agritourism only, 256 combined agritourism with direct sales such as farm stands and U-pick, and 5,492 sold directly to consumers without agritourism. And 43.4% of the agritourism-only farms were under 50 acres.

In other words, this isn't just a big-farm game. Small Ohio farms are doing it too.

A note for the record (because accuracy matters)

The Marketplace story says the number of people paying to visit these farms rose 33%. We checked: the Census of Agriculture doesn't count visitors. The Penn State research the story links to reports a 33% rise in national agritourism income, from $949.3 million in 2017 to $1.26 billion in 2022, before inflation. That's still impressive. It's just a different measure. On this site we go back to the original source, so you can make decisions on facts instead of headlines.

Two Ohio Farms, Two Lessons

Statistics tell you what's happening. Stories tell you how. Marketplace profiled two farms near Cleveland that show two very different ways agritourism pays.

Two Ohio agritourism farms compared: Patterson Fruit Farm earns about 20% of revenue from tickets, weddings and U-pick, while Derthick's Farm earns virtually all its profit from agritourism

Lesson 1 from Patterson Fruit Farm: Agritourism feeds everything else you sell

Patterson's has been a farm since the mid-19th century. Agritourism wasn't a grand plan. It started as crowd control.

Today, the family told Marketplace, about 20% of the farm's revenue comes from its ticketed Fun Fest, weddings and pick-your-own orchards. The other 80% comes from sales at the on-farm market and in local grocery stores.

But don't read that as "agritourism is only 20%." Look at how the pieces work together. Farm Credit, which helped finance the farm's 10-year growth plan, reported that Fun Fest visitors also line up to buy donuts, pies, fritters and other baked goods. After the farm added a 2,500-square-foot expansion to increase baking output, its sales of donuts, pies and apple fritters went up.

That's the lesson most farmers miss. The ticket gets people through the gate. The pie, the cider and the bag of apples they carry to the car is where a big share of the money gets made. I break down this exact strategy in upsells that double your agritourism revenue without more visitors.

Farm market barn stocked with apple cider, pies, cider donuts, apples and pumpkins for agritourism visitors

The ticket gets them through the gate. The pie and cider go home in the car.

Lesson 2 from Derthick's Farm: When the crop pays nothing, the experience pays everything

MaryEllen Hamlin's ancestors started Derthick's Farm in 1806. Today, she told Marketplace, virtually all of the farm's profit comes from agritourism.

"I make about 40 acres of hay, but there's no income in that," she said. The corn gets sold after the maze season, "but the price of corn is not great either."

The farm's 17-acre corn maze started in the late 2000s. Today there's also a zip line, slides and farm animals to pet. The maze is the product now. The corn is a byproduct.

That's a dramatic shift, and it isn't right for everyone. But it proves something I tell farm owners all the time: your land isn't only a place to grow a commodity. It's a place people will pay to experience. On my own durian farm in Malaysia, I saw this firsthand when we added a 4WD agritourism adventure ride.

The Bigger Picture: What the National Numbers Say

Ohio isn't an outlier. Here's what the 2022 Census of Agriculture shows across the U.S., as analyzed by USDA's Economic Research Service and by researchers at Penn State and the University of Maine:

$1.26 billion: total U.S. income from agritourism and recreational services in 2022, up 12.4% from 2017 after adjusting for inflation.
28,617 farms reported agritourism income, about 1.5% of all U.S. farms.
$44,004: the average agritourism income per farm.
57% of U.S. counties reported some agritourism income.

Bar chart of agritourism income growth from 2017 to 2022: farms under 10 acres up 137%, farms of 10 to 49.9 acres up 50%, all U.S. agritourism farms up 33%

Here's the part that should get small-farm owners excited. The smallest farms grew the fastest. Farms under 10 acres saw their agritourism income jump 137% to $89 million, and their average agritourism income per farm more than doubled to $27,010. Farms of 10 to 49.9 acres grew 50% to $226.7 million. By 2022, farms under 50 acres earned a quarter of all U.S. agritourism income.

Here's how Ohio stacks up against the country as a whole:

2022 Census of Agriculture	Ohio	United States
Farms with agritourism income	894	28,617
Change in farms since 2017	+27%	Almost flat (+0.1%)
Total agritourism income	$32.2 million	$1.26 billion
Income growth since 2017 (before inflation)	+137%	+33%
Average agritourism income per farm	About $36,000	$44,004

Ohio grew its number of agritourism farms far faster than the national average. That's exactly the trend Marketplace picked up on.

One more number from the same research. The census tracks several kinds of farm-related income besides crop and livestock sales, such as custom work, renting out land and selling timber. Of those, only two averaged more per farm than agritourism: crop and livestock insurance payments ($52,819) and a catch-all "other" category ($47,390).

The damaging admission

Now let me tell you what most "agritourism opportunity" articles leave out.

Nationally, the number of agritourism farms barely moved, from 28,575 in 2017 to 28,617 in 2022. Texas alone lost 907. And as I showed in my breakdown of the census data, 47.7% of agritourism farms took in under $5,000 a year, while a smaller group of farms took home most of the money.

So agritourism isn't a magic money machine. It's a business. The farms that run it like a business tend to win. The farms that throw open the gate and hope usually don't.

The Warning Nobody Puts in the Brochure: Insurance

Remember MaryEllen Hamlin? Here's the part of her story that should make every farmer sit up. The insurance she needs to run agritourism, she told Marketplace, keeps getting more expensive every year.

She isn't alone.

In February 2026, Insurance Journal reported "meaningful growth" in demand for agritourism insurance. Jeremy Staun of Nationwide pointed to rising premises liability losses, animal contact incidents and weather damage to temporary event structures.
The same report listed the exposures farmers most often overlook: "parking lot liability, temporary structures like those tents or stages, [and] volunteers that aren't always considered in risk planning."
Suzi Spahr, executive director of NAFDMA International Agritourism Association, put it plainly in DTN's Progressive Farmer this fall: "The typical farm policy does not cover agritourism." She also noted that state agritourism laws protect owners against inherent risks but do not excuse negligence.
Purdue Extension farm safety specialist Bill Field told Farm Progress that his short advice to farmers considering agritourism is "don't." He has been involved in close to 10 cases where a farm opened to visitors and something went wrong. Field and Todd Milburn of Grinnell Mutual flagged old equipment, ponds and lagoons, electric fences, bulls and hayrides as features that can raise your rates, and they may not be covered unless you disclose them to your agent.

Tractor pulling a hay wagon full of families along a farm lane in autumn, an agritourism activity insurers ask about

Hayrides are one of the activities insurers ask about. Disclose every one.

I don't agree with "don't." But I respect the warning, and you should too. The farms that get hurt are usually the ones that skip this step.

7 questions to ask your insurance agent before your first paying visitor

1. Does my current farm policy cover paying visitors at all, or do I need an agritourism endorsement or a separate policy?

2. Which activities are covered by name: hayrides, U-pick, corn maze, animals, weddings?

3. Are parking areas, tents, stages and other temporary structures covered?

4. Are volunteers and seasonal workers covered?

5. Do I need liquor liability if I host weddings or serve alcohol?

6. What does my state's agritourism liability law require, such as warning signs or waiver wording, and how does it work with this policy?

7. Which safety steps, like written procedures, equipment inspections and staff training, would lower my premium?

For the full breakdown of what coverage you need and how to get quotes, read my guide to agritourism insurance. If you farm in Texas or North Carolina, I've written state-specific guides too: Texas agritourism insurance and agritourism insurance in North Carolina.

The Second Warning: Competition Is Coming

There's one more detail in Hamlin's story that's easy to miss. Two competing corn mazes have opened on nearby farms.

That's what happens when a good idea goes mainstream. Every struggling farm in the county has the same thought at the same time.

If your plan is "a corn maze, like theirs," you've just rebuilt the commodity trap. You're competing on price again. Only now it's the price of a ticket instead of the price of a bushel.

The way out is to be different, not cheaper. Give people a reason to choose your farm that the farm down the road can't copy: your story, your crop, your family's history, a signature experience only you offer. I show you how in the signature experience formula.

Your 5-Step Survival Plan

If your margins are getting squeezed right now, here's what I would do, in this order.

Step 1: Compare a bushel with a visitor

Work out what you net per acre from your crop this year. Then estimate what you could net per visitor from an experience on that same land.

Here's a quick napkin example. USDA's September forecast puts the national corn yield at 178.5 bushels an acre. At $4.80 a bushel, that's about $857 an acre in gross revenue, before you pay for seed, fertilizer, diesel, land and labor. Now picture a hypothetical pumpkin patch weekend on a few of those acres: 200 visitors at $10 each is $2,000 at the gate, before anyone buys a pie. Your real numbers will be different, and visitors bring their own costs. But that's the kind of comparison you need to run.

Use the break-even math in Is Agritourism Profitable? to see how many paying visitors you'd need to cover your costs.

Step 2: Start with what you already own

Patterson's started with straw bales. You probably already have a barn, a trail, an orchard or a story worth telling. Read how to launch an agritourism business using only the infrastructure you already own before you spend a dollar on construction.

Step 3: Test before you build

Run a small trial first: one weekend, one activity, a few paying families. My 60-minute MVP method shows you how to prove people will pay before you borrow money.

Step 4: Sell on the farm

The ticket is the start, not the finish. Pies, cider, fresh produce, photo spots, gift boxes. Patterson's bakery expansion tells you where a lot of the money is.

Step 5: Call your insurance agent before the first visitor arrives

Not after. Before. Use the seven questions above.

Free tools to get you started

Not sure if your farm is ready? Take the free Farm Readiness Quiz. It takes a few minutes and shows you where your farm is strong and where it's exposed. When you sign up, you'll also get the 21-Point Agritourism Blueprint free.

Take the Free Farm Readiness Quiz

Get the Free 21-Point Agritourism Blueprint

This Isn't Just an American Story

I farm durians in Malaysia, thousands of miles from Ohio. Different crop, different climate, different currency. Same squeeze.

Wherever you farm, you don't control what buyers pay for your harvest, and you don't control what diesel, fertilizer or insurance will cost next season. What you can control is the experience you offer the people who want to see where their food comes from.

So the question the Ohio farmers in this story had to answer is the same one facing farm owners from Asia to Europe to the Americas: what else can this land earn?

The details change from country to country, especially laws and insurance. The principles in this article don't.

Frequently Asked Questions About Farms Turning to Agritourism

Why are farms turning to agritourism?

Crop prices have fallen from their 2022 highs while costs such as diesel, fertilizer and insurance keep rising. USDA forecasts 2026 net farm income down 5.5% after inflation, and the median farm household earned negative $495 from farming in 2025. Agritourism gives farms income that doesn't depend on commodity markets.

How much do agritourism farms make?

In the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the 28,617 U.S. farms with agritourism income averaged $44,004 each. Results vary widely. 47.7% took in under $5,000, while the most successful farms earned far more.

How many farms in Ohio offer agritourism?

894 Ohio farms reported agritourism income in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, up from 703 in 2017. Their combined agritourism income was $32.2 million, up from $13.6 million, before inflation.

Does a regular farm insurance policy cover agritourism?

Usually not. A typical farm policy does not cover paying visitors, so most operations need an agritourism endorsement or a separate liability policy. Ask your agent about every activity, parking areas, temporary structures and volunteers.

Can a small farm make money from agritourism?

Yes. Farms under 10 acres grew their agritourism income 137% between 2017 and 2022, and farms under 50 acres earned a quarter of all U.S. agritourism income in 2022.

Is it too late to start agritourism?

No, but competition is growing, so copying the farm down the road is risky. Farms that offer something unique, test demand before they build and treat agritourism as a real business have the best odds.

The Bottom Line

The farmers in this story aren't chasing a trend. They're adapting to a squeeze that doesn't look like it's going away soon.

Crop prices are well below their peak. Diesel, fertilizer and insurance cost more than they did a year ago. And for the typical farm household, farming itself doesn't pay the bills.

Meanwhile, the families who visit Patterson's and Derthick's every fall aren't going anywhere. They want to pick their own apples, get lost in a corn maze and take a pie home. They'll pay for it.

You can keep waiting for the price of corn to rescue your farm. Or you can do what Bill Patterson did with 50 straw bales: notice what people already want, and build a business around it, carefully, with the right insurance and something nobody else can copy.

The gate is already there. The question is whether you'll open it the smart way.

P.S. Most farms that struggle with agritourism make the same few mistakes before they ever open. The free Farm Readiness Quiz shows you in a few minutes which ones your farm is at risk of.

P.P.S. Want to see how real farms turned visitors into income? My guide 10 Real Farms Making Money With Agritourism breaks down 10 farms, from Italy to Vietnam to Hawaii, what they did and what you can copy.

About the author: Stephen Loke of AgritourismSuccess.com, whose farm is featured in Bloomberg News and Asahi Shimbun. Stephen runs a fruit farm in Malaysia that welcomes visitors from around the world, and teaches small farm owners how to build profitable agritourism businesses.