Plan a wedding, save a farm
Sam McElhinney MBA ’17 found a way to help New England small farms, family estates, and orchards by creating a system that enables them to host events easily.
Despite conservation efforts and a resurgence in local farming, New England is still losing about 100 agricultural acres to development every day. For many small farms, family estates, orchards, and other largely undeveloped properties, the cost of taxes and maintenance alone can make keeping their land too expensive.
Sam McElhinney, born and raised in Massachusetts and an avid lover of the outdoors, always wanted to find a way to conserve the open lands he so loved. It wasn’t until McElhinney, who was on the lumberjack team and president of the fishing club at Dartmouth College, reached his late 20s and he and many of his friends began planning their own weddings that the idea hit him.
“Traditional, professional event venues are built to more or less mass produce events,” says McElhinney. “I was away one weekend with friends at a farm and they were all talking about how generic weddings felt at these commercial event venues and I said why not just get married somewhere like this and create the entire thing to be the way you want?”
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Some couples do get married on a farm owned by a family member or friend — but unless you know someone willing to do this as a one-time favor, getting a stranger to transform an old estate into a wedding venue poses many problems. McElhinney saw…
