Guide · Farm parks

What events should a farm park run?

A farm park's year has two shapes: a handful of weeks where you turn people away, and a long middle where the car park has room. Events are how you even that out, and the seasons largely choose themselves. What they do not tell you is which ones are worth the work.

Updated August 2026 · About a 7 minute read

The farm park year, honestly

Most farm parks make their year in about ten weeks: Easter, the summer holidays, half terms, the pumpkin fortnight and the Christmas grotto. The rest is weather, school trips and hope.

Events are the lever on the rest. Not because a February event will ever match an August Saturday, but because a February event turns a day worth almost nothing into a day worth something, and it keeps staff employed and the site in people's minds.

Late winter: lambing, and the season nobody else has

Lambing is the strongest card a farm park holds, because it is genuinely seasonal, genuinely yours, and it lands in the emptiest part of the year.

• Timed lambing sessions. Small groups, a proper talk, hands-on where you can. It justifies a higher ticket than general entry and it fills February weekends.
• Bottle feeding slots. The thing children remember, and easy to cap tightly.
• Behind the scenes tours for adults, priced accordingly. There is a real audience for the farming rather than the petting.

The constraint is that lambing does not run to a diary. Sell it as dated sessions you can add to rather than a fixed programme published in December.

Spring: Easter, and the one you must cap

Easter is the first genuine peak, and the one most likely to go wrong operationally because demand arrives in four days.

• Easter egg trail on timed entry. An untimed trail on Good Friday is how you get a queue at the gate and a bad review week.
• Meet the Easter Bunny, run exactly like a grotto: short slots, fixed capacity, booked ahead.
• Animal handling sessions, which spread families across the site rather than concentrating them at one attraction.

Summer: the season that runs itself, and what to add anyway

You do not need events to fill August. What you need is a reason for the same family to come twice, and something for the wet days.

• A weekly changing activity so a returning family gets something new. Cheap to run, and it turns one visit into two.
• Indoor craft sessions as a wet weather option, capped and bookable, so a washout day still earns.
• Evening opening in the hottest weeks, which uses hours you were closed and reaches people who work.

Autumn and winter: the two that matter most

Pumpkins and the grotto are now the backbone of the second half of the year for most farm parks, and both are capacity problems rather than demand problems.

• Pick your own pumpkins on timed entry, sized by your car park rather than your field. There is a fuller piece on running a pumpkin patch.
• An after dark Halloween trail, which reaches an older audience and uses closed hours.
• Santa's grotto, where the slot length decides the season's revenue. See planning a Christmas grotto.
• Breakfast with Santa if you have a cafe, which is usually the highest value per head you will sell all year.

The year-round earners

Underneath the seasons, three categories work in almost any week:

• Birthday parties. Steady, bookable, and they bring a group of families who may not know you.
• School and nursery visits. Midweek, term time, and precisely the days you cannot otherwise fill. Worth pricing and packaging properly rather than treating as an enquiry.
• Animal experiences. Feeding, grooming, a keeper for an hour. High margin, tiny capacity, and they sell out.

What these have in common

Almost everything above is a fixed capacity at a fixed time, which is why farm parks outgrow a diary and a phone quickly. Three practical points:

• Cap by the bottleneck, which is usually parking or one member of staff, not the size of the site.
• Take payment up front for anything with a small capacity. A free reservation for a lambing session is not a booking.
• Price the quiet days differently, so a midweek February session can run at a rate that still makes sense.

That is how Hatch works: every event is sessions with their own times, prices and capacity, extras are their own ticket types, and the money lands in your own Stripe account. There is more on ticketing for farm parks.

Common questions

What is the best event for a farm park to run?

By revenue it is usually the Christmas grotto, and by strategic value it is lambing. The grotto concentrates a great deal of money into a few weeks, but lambing is the one that creates visits which would not otherwise happen, because it lands in February when nothing else brings people out and no other kind of venue can offer it.

How do you fill a farm park in the quiet months?

Judge an event by whether it creates a visit that would not otherwise have happened. A summer craft session is pleasant but those families were coming anyway, whereas a February lambing weekend or a school visit on a wet Tuesday turns a day worth almost nothing into a day worth something. Midweek and term-time pricing should differ from your peak rate so those sessions still make sense to run.

Should farm park events be booked in advance?

Anything with a small capacity should be, and paid for at the point of booking. Lambing sessions, animal experiences and grotto slots all have a hard limit set by one member of staff or one space, so a free reservation is a hope rather than a booking. Timed entry matters most at Easter and for pumpkins, where the whole problem is that demand arrives in a handful of days.

Written for UK farm parks. Which of these fits depends on your stock, your site and your staffing, and an event that is transformative at one farm can be a distraction at another.