When the Adirondack Harvest Becomes a Story Worth Hearing
Adirondack Harvest Festival at the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport, NY.
Every fall, the Adirondacks put their harvest on display. At the Adirondack Harvest Festival, the people behind that harvest step forward, too.
The annual food and agriculture festival returns to the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport, NY, on September 19, 2026, from 12 – 5 pm, bringing farmers, makers and the community together in one of the Adirondacks’ most agricultural corners.
This year, there's another reason to stop and talk; ADK Talks will bring its pop-up mobile podcast studio to the festival, collecting voices and stories from the people who grow, make, cook and care about Adirondack food for a future episode.
Want more stories from around the Park? In Good Taste is ADK Taste’s weekly guide to Adirondack food, people, places and events. Subscribe now.
The Adirondacks have an agricultural story, too.
Mountains tend to dominate the Adirondack identity. Hiking trails, lakes and wilderness are easy shorthand for a region whose protected landscape is its defining feature.
But travel east toward Lake Champlain and another Adirondack landscape comes into focus. Farms and orchards occupy the valleys and open ground of Essex County, and agriculture remains part of both the economy and the culture.
The Adirondack Harvest Festival was created in 2016 to celebrate that connection — supporting local farms and businesses while giving visitors a chance to meet the people producing food in the region.
That makes it more than a seasonal festival. It is a once-a-year gathering of a food system that normally operates across farm fields, markets, kitchens and small communities scattered throughout the region.
Listen: Adirondack harvest goes beyond one season.
The Adirondack Harvest Festival celebrates the region’s farms and food at the height of harvest season, but the local food story continues long after the festival tents come down. In this episode of ADK Talks, “Season to Season: Adirondack Harvest and the Year-Round Local Food Movement,” the conversation explores how Adirondack farmers, producers and communities are working to make locally grown food part of life year-round.
The episode provides useful context for what visitors will encounter at the Adirondack Harvest Festival in Westport: a regional food system built not simply around what is harvested in September, but around the people who work to keep Adirondack-grown food connected to local communities year-round.
Bees and honey tell a bigger Adirondack story.
The 2026 theme, “Bees & Honey,” gives the festival a particularly small protagonist with an outsized job.
Workshops and demonstrations will explore connections to bees and honey, while the festival continues to embrace the broader spectrum of Adirondack harvests.
Visitors can browse local farm products, meet makers, try food and spend an afternoon learning more about what is produced here and who produces it.
It is also a useful reminder that “local food” is not simply a phrase printed on a menu. Behind it are farmers, producers, seasons, weather, land and, yes, an army of pollinators quietly doing their part.
See the Adirondack Harvest Festival in Westport.
The theme changes each year, but this look at the 2023 Adirondack Harvest Festival at the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport captures the larger experience: local farmers and producers, food, demonstrations and a community gathering built around Adirondack agriculture.
The Adirondack Harvest Festival brings farms, food and community together each September at the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport, NY. Video: Adirondack Harvest.
In 2026, ADK Talks will add another element to that gathering — a place for some of those farmers, makers and festivalgoers to tell their own Adirondack stories.
ADK Talks takes the studio on the road.
ADK Talks will be among those listening.
For the Adirondack Harvest Festival, the podcast is taking a familiar format out of the studio and into the field. Jane and Steve will set up an ADK Talks pop-up mobile studio and invite festivalgoers, farmers and other participants to stop by and share their stories.
The concept follows the podcast’s pop-up at the Lake George Land Conservancy’s Hike-A-Thon, where short conversations captured something a traditional sit-down interview cannot always reproduce: many different voices describing their own relationship with the Adirondacks.
At the Harvest Festival, the subject shifts from trails and conserved landscapes to agriculture, food and community.
Some conversations may be about farming. Others may begin with honey, a favorite Adirondack food tradition or a family connection to the region. Collectively, those voices will help shape a future ADK Talks episode about the Adirondack harvest and the people behind it.
And unlike most podcast appearances, no microphone experience is required. A good Adirondack story will do nicely.
Autumn’s bounty.
Westport puts visitors close to the source.
The Essex County Fairgrounds provides an apt setting. Westport sits in the Champlain Valley, where the Adirondack landscape opens toward Lake Champlain, and agriculture becomes far more visible than it is in many mountain communities farther west.
That geography makes the festival particularly interesting for travelers. A September trip to the Adirondacks does not have to revolve exclusively around foliage overlooks and trailheads. It can also include meeting a farmer, tasting something grown nearby and understanding the working landscape beneath all that fall color.
The festival is equally suited to residents who want to know more about where their food comes from, families looking for an afternoon outing and travelers exploring Westport, Essex and the Lake Champlain side of the Adirondacks.
ADK Taste recommendations.
Allow enough time to do more than make a quick circuit of the fairgrounds. Browse first, talk to producers and choose at least one workshop or demonstration tied to the “Bees & Honey” theme.
And stop by the ADK Talks mobile studio. Visitors do not need a polished story or prepared speech; the most interesting conversations often begin with something as simple as why they came, what they grow or what keeps bringing them back to the Adirondacks.
One practical note deserves emphasis: leave dogs at home. Festival organizers do not permit dogs at the event, and they cannot be left in vehicles.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
ADK Taste perspective.
The Adirondack Harvest Festival matters because it expands the usual definition of an Adirondack experience. The Park is not only a landscape people visit. It is also a place where people work the land, make things, feed their neighbors and pass knowledge from one generation to another.
Those stories can be harder to see from the highway.
On September 19, some of them will gather in one place in Westport — and this year, there will be microphones waiting.
For more hand-picked Adirondack events, food finds and stories from around the Park, subscribe to In Good Taste, ADK Taste’s weekly guide to discovering what’s worth the trip.
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