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Do farms need to collect waivers?
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Do US farms need signed waivers, or is a checkout question enough? Understand your options, your risk, and how to collect waivers without hurting bookings.
This guide is written for farms operating in the US, where waiver requirements vary by state and insurer.
Whether you need waivers, and what kind, comes down to your risk and your insurer. Here is how to think it through
If you run a farm attraction, you have probably had the waiver conversation more than once. Do you need them at all? Can you just add a question at checkout? Does every visitor need to sign, or is one signature from the person who booked enough?
The honest answer is that it depends on your activities, your state, and what your insurer asks of you. There is no single rule that applies to every farm. But there are clear options, each with different levels of protection and different trade-offs.
We have spent years building and running waivers for experience operators, and we see how this plays out across hundreds of farms, animal attractions, haunts and water-based activities. The patterns are consistent, and so is the confusion. This blog is here to clear it up.
In this blog, we explore:
- Why the waiver question starts with risk, not paperwork
- The main options open to you, and what each one actually protects
- Why checkout is usually the wrong place to collect a waiver
- How to get strong protection without hurting your bookings
- How to handle visitors who arrive without a signed waiver
Start with your risk, not the waiver
Before you decide how to collect waivers, you need to understand what you are protecting against. A farm visit with a play barn and a pumpkin patch carries different risk to one with zip lines, big slides, or animal handling. The higher the risk, the more a robust waiver matters.
Two things shape the answer more than anything else. The first is your state. More than half of US states have agritourism statutes that give operators a degree of protection, and some require specific wording in your signage or your waiver for that protection to apply. Where no such statute exists, a waiver carries more weight. This is also why a generic, off-the-shelf waiver can let you down. The right wording in one state can be the difference between a statute protecting you and not. The National Agricultural Law Center keeps a free, state-by-state compilation of agritourism statutes, which is a good starting point for checking where your state stands.
The second is your insurer. They are the ones setting the requirement, and they may be perfectly happy with a lighter approach for a lower-risk farm visit than they would be for a white-water rafting operator. It is worth asking them directly what they expect, rather than assuming. We have seen operators collect far more than they needed to, and others collect far less than their coverage actually required. It is also worth knowing that many agritourism activities are not covered by standard farm insurance policies, so additional liability coverage may be needed. Your broker is the right person to confirm this.
It is also worth remembering what a waiver is really for. It rarely stops someone bringing a claim. What it does is demonstrate that the visitor was made aware of the risk and chose to take part anyway, which is a meaningful defense if a claim is ever made. That is why the quality and completeness of your records matters as much as the act of collecting them.
Top tip: Treat your insurer and a local attorney as the source of truth here, not your booking system. We can support almost any approach they ask for, but the requirement itself should come from them.
The options, and what each one protects
There are broadly three approaches, and it helps to see them side by side.
1️⃣ No waiver, relying on signage and assumption of risk.
Some lower-risk operators lean on clear signage warning of uneven ground, trip hazards, and inherent risks. This has a place, but on its own it is the weakest position if a claim is ever made.
2️⃣ A single waiver from the person who books.
This is what most farms do today, often as a checkout question. It is familiar and low-friction. The catch is that the lead booker usually has no legal authority to sign on behalf of the rest of their party, so the other visitors have not personally acknowledged anything. A simple checkbox is weaker still, because it often does not count as a valid e-signature.
3️⃣ An individual signed waiver from every attendee.
This is the strongest position. Each visitor has personally acknowledged the risk, which supports an assumption-of-risk defense if a claim is ever brought. Even where a waiver is not fully enforceable, for example a parent signing for a minor in states that do not allow it, a signed record still helps, and other clauses such as venue and indemnity can still hold.
A common sticking point here is school trips and group bookings. A teacher or group organizer almost never has the legal authority to sign on behalf of the children or adults in their group, so a single group signature offers little protection. This is exactly where per-attendee digital waivers earn their place. You send one link, parents and guardians sign for their own child, and the organizer does not have to chase paper.
The right choice is the one that matches your risk and satisfies your insurer. For many low-risk farms that will be a simple question at checkout. For higher-risk activities, animal handling, hayrides or anything involving minors, it is more likely to be individual ones.
Why checkout is usually the wrong place
It is tempting to bolt a waiver onto the booking flow as a checkout question. We would caution against it for two reasons.
First, it harms conversion. Asking for signatures, or named details for every attendee, at the point of purchase adds friction exactly where you can least afford it. It also creates a headache when party sizes or names change after booking, which they often do.
Second, the protection is thin. A single signature or checkbox at checkout binds the booker, not the group, so you end up with the weakest form of waiver attached to the most sensitive part of the journey.
You do not have to choose between protecting your business and protecting your bookings.
How to get the protection without the friction
This is why we collect waivers digitally, after purchase, rather than at checkout. The visitor books with no added friction, then completes a waiver for each attendee through their confirmation (and reminder) email, in their own time, before they arrive.
It works well in practice. Across our farm and attraction clients, on average 67% of waivers are completed before arrival, with no admin required from the operator. Because it is a post-checkout action taken by the visitor, there is no operational overhead for your team.
A few things make this practical rather than painful:
- It is optional per event, so you only use it where it makes sense, for example a haunt or an animal experience rather than general admission
- You can still admit visitors who have not signed, so it never blocks your gate
- Every waiver is timestamped and tied to a named attendee, which gives you far better records than a single purchaser signature if anything is ever questioned later
Top tip: Because waivers are built into Beyonk rather than bolted on through a separate tool, every signed waiver is linked back to the booking it belongs to. If a claim ever surfaces, you are not cross-referencing two systems or digging through paper. The record is already attached to the booking and timestamped.
Handling the visitors who arrive without signing
No system gets you to 100% signed before arrival, and you shouldn’t expect one to. The real test of a waiver setup is what happens at the gate when someone turns up without one.
At check-in, you see a clear list of who has signed and who has not for that group. That alone removes the guesswork your team would otherwise face on a busy morning. For anyone missing a waiver, you can collect it on the spot. Resend the digital waiver for them to complete on their own phone, or fall back to a paper waiver if connectivity is poor or it is simply quicker.
This matters because farm gates get busy, and cell signal on site is not always reliable. Having both a digital and a paper route at check-in means an unsigned visitor never becomes a bottleneck, and you still capture the record either way.
The deeper point is that record-keeping is where most operators get caught out, not collection. Claims can surface years after a visit, long after anyone remembers the day. A searchable, per-attendee record tied to the original booking is a far stronger position than a stack of paper in a drawer or a single name on an order.
In summary
There is no universal rule that every farm must collect waivers the same way. What matters is that you understand your own risk, check what your state and your insurer require, and then pick the approach that fits.
If you do collect waivers, per-attendee and post-purchase is the strongest option that does not cost you bookings. You get individual acknowledgement, clean digital records linked back to each booking, the ability to collect from anyone who arrives unsigned, and no friction at checkout or admin on the day.
Get the risk question right first. With waivers built into the same system you already use to take bookings and check visitors in, the collection method is the easy part.
If you’d like to see how it works, or explore what it could look like for your farm, get in touch or book a demo with the team.
