 Due to budget constraints, the Parks and Recreation set department did not build the harvest festival and corn maze sets, but instead filmed the episode at the annual Halloween Harvest Festival at Los Angeles Pierce College, a community college in California. Michael Schur said the aerial shot of the harvest festival at the end of the episode was the most expensive in the entire series. The episode was filmed out of sequence from the rest of the season so the weather would be cooler when the scenes were shot; Schur jokingly said if this was not done, "the week that we would have been shooting it was like 148 degrees here and the actors would be dead now". "Harvest Festival" was screened for members of the media during a January 2011 NBC press junket. Afterward, the reporters were taken to the set of Parks and Recreation where they were able to greet and pose for photos with the actual miniature horse who played Li 'l Sebastian. Shortly after the episode aired, a "Producer's Cut" version was made available on the official NBC website. It was about five minutes longer than the televised version and included several scenes that were originally cut due to length limitations, including an extended cold open with the parks department meeting Li 'l Sebastian, and additional scenes of Leslie meeting with Pawnee constituents before the Harvest Festival.
