Here Are Some New Ideas To Help Agritourism Grow
March 3, 2021 The famous phrase, “A rose is a rose…” crossed my mind when a couple of different headlines popped up in my inbox a few weeks ago. We’ve been using the term agritourism in the U.S. to cover a wide variety of “on-farm experiences and product sales closely tied to agriculture” — as defined by the National Agriculture Library — for nearly three decades now.
The first headline that caught my eye? “These Airbnb ‘Farm Stays’ Are the Perfect Escape from Your WFH Routine.” (WFH stands for work from home.) I anticipated reading about farm-life experiences — hands-on learning about the challenges and rewards of farming by spending a week or two lending a hand.
No, these were simply houses, cabins, even tree houses, for rent on farms to give a countryside respite to pent-up urban/suburbanites seeking a break from their WFH drudgery. During your stays, you may get to see some bucolic farm scenes and even some animals roaming the fields, but that’s as close as you get.
The origin of the word agritourism is attributed to the Italian word agriturismo, which came into use in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s when Italian farmers started inviting visitors for farm stays, or farm holiday stays as they came to be known in Britain, to help make ends meet when farm prices were low.
We now use the word to describe a great variety of marketing activities. But hosting visitors on farms long pre-dates regulators and academics coming up with new words to describe them. I’m sure my grandmother was not the first to take boarders into her farmhouse to defray some of the expenses way back in the 1930s-1940s.
New Version of CSA
I came across another novel approach for a traditional farm marketing concept.
North Carolina State (NCS) Extension is working on a new rendition of CSAs: VSA – Vacationer Supported Agriculture
Still stuck on the idea of farm-working vacations, I had to dig deeper. And like the Airbnb Farm Stays, I was off track on this one too.
As part of a USDA grant-funded project, NCS Extension colleagues helped a group of small farmers from several counties along the Atlantic shore pre-sell CSA-style shares to vacationers visiting the Outer Banks.
There’s no on-farm experience, but vacationers get a tasty selection of NC fresh produce delivered to their shore rentals directly from local farms. A local realtor encouraged visitors to pre-order bags of “Vacation Vittles.” And a local civic group involved its youth ambassadors in delivering the produce bags to arriving vacationers.
It was a win for all involved.
Hmm… I wonder if a couple of my realtor friends at the Jersey Shore would be interested in a Garden State/Jersey Fresh VSA.
What Is Agritourism?
The spectrum of ‘agritourism’ marketing activities is complex. Lisa C. Chase et al. created this great illustration in Agritourism: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Industry Analysis, (2018). The authors describe five major groupings of marketing activities, divided into on-farm and off-farm, and becoming less directly related to selling of products from individual farms as one moves further from the center.
Source: Oregon State University
Subscribe Today For
