Courtesy Guy Pelly
Times are tough for farmers. Recently released USDA data for 2024 shows all but the largest commercial farms posting years of net losses from agriculture, with non-farming income picking up the slack. Rental giant Airbnb says it wants to help on both those fronts.
In November, Airbnb and American Farmland Trust will open grant applications for up to 350 farmers nationwide. Between 25 and 30 winners will receive $5,000 to $10,000 to upgrade their working farms with guest accommodations and agritourism experiences. Per an Airbnb report, the average farmstay brought in $8,000 for property owners in 2025. That helped offset the median farm’s net losses of $2,800, according to the USDA.
In Virginia, annual farmstay income averaged roughly $10,000, says Airbnb spokesperson Ivan Valladares. “I think it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a silver bullet,” he says. “But this can be a meaningful boost for working farmers.”
Guy Pelly has owned Keswick’s 413-acre Merrie Mill Farm & Vineyard with his wife Elizabeth since 2019. The Pellys opened a winery tasting room there in 2021, followed in 2022 by a renovated guest cottage that he rents via Airbnb. “If you count everyone staying in the cottage, it would be about 250 people a year,” Pelly says. “Those numbers have steadily increased.”
Merrie Mill grows grapes, and last spring’s late frost “basically wiped out our crop,” Pelly says. Renting out the cottage “is good steady income and is profitable, which is a hard thing to achieve in this business, so it definitely helps.”
Renovating that cottage cost Pelly $10,000, he says. A grant like Airbnb’s “would have helped a lot, because we didn’t need to do any construction work. If you are getting into construction, then that figure may seem quite small.”
Airbnb’s report touts the $120 million farmstay hosts collectively earned in 2025. But the grant program seems small in comparison to what Valladares describes as an “incredible need” among farmers. It involves fewer than one winner per U.S. state, and a total spend on the company’s part of no more than $300,000. That’s pocket change for Airbnb, which ended its second quarter June 30 with $6.8 billion in cash and quarterly profits topping $800 million.
American Farmland Trust has 40 years of experience working to conserve farmland, Valladares says, and Airbnb followed its guidance “in what they thought would be most impactful. So grants range up to $10,000, and we believe that’s going to help bring ideas that might otherwise just stay on paper [to] help farmers get ready with their properties to generate income for years to come.”
“The goal of this grant program is to help farmers make ends meet during a particularly challenging economic time,” Valladares says. “So we hope that people can see the opportunity, and we’re just trying to make it even more accessible.”
