Farm tourism keeps growing
With gas prices on their minds, California's summer vacationers will have opportunity to stay closer to home by taking vacations on the farm.
In the farm community, they call the irresistible attraction that farms present and the response to it by city dwellers "agritourism." It is a rapidly growing phenomenon that is bringing substantial pleasure and satisfaction to both farmers and their visitors, and an occasional touch of profit to farm operators.
The potential is great in the nation's largest and most diversified farm state. From avocados and artichokes to zucchini and zoysia grass, the variety of food products in the growing stage is enormous. And on the hoof, visitors can get up close and personal with animals from alpacas to zoo animals.
The agritourism wave has assumed such a prominent position that its growth was given eight pages of coverage in the April-June edition of California Agriculture, the University of California's peer-reviewed quarterly journal.
Authors Ellen Rilla, Shermain Hardesty, Christy Getz and Holly George concluded that agritourism's momentum can be encouraged if local governments update countywide plans and zoning and development codes with revisions that will accommodate on-farm agritourism businesses.
Three of the authors are with the university's extension service: Rilla in Marin County, Getz at Berkeley, and George in Plumas and Sierra counties. Hardesty is a specialist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis.
To measure the impressive growth of tourism involving California farms, the university team assembled a survey group and proceeded to send a questionnaire to all farm operators they could identify as having taken part at some level of farm site sales and hospitality activities for visitors, such as camping, day visits, bed and breakfast accommodations, and tours.
The survey, conducted in 2009, showed 25 percent of the farmer-responders were located in the Central Valley, with the foothill and mountain areas a close second with slightly more than 24 percent, and North Coast farm sites third with 20.2 percent already involved in some form of agritourism.
In the good, old-fashioned spirit of free enterprise, a strong 75 percent of the respondents said they participate in agritourism as an effort to increase profitability of their farm operations. It isn't a stretch to say they want to "make a buck" if possible. The most common activity was hosting school field trips, but only 17 percent of them charged a fee — not so capitalistic.
In a survey taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2007, the return to the 685 California farmers involved in agritourism was $35 million, a mere drop in the bucket to the $35 billion returned to all California farmers last year for their crops. Of course, that amount is likely to be much larger today, and the USDA's definition of agritourism was much finer than the wide range of activities included now.
Today's broader definition of the term includes 34 different activities ranging from farm stand sales, pumpkin patches and corn mazes to cattle drives and cultural festivals. "Weddings, family reunions and retreats" is one category growing in popularity.
Those who conducted the survey in 2009 have supported and helped establish a mechanism that directs inquirers to the farm locations that offer vacation possibilities, from day trips and overnight accommodations to hunts or trail rides that can last a week or two.
Agritourists can find features and choices and even a map at the University of California agritourism website, www.calag tour.org. Both the activity search and event calendar categories provide choices, some leading to specific locations and websites.
If gas prices rise further, a vacation spent touring the websites is a possibility.
CONTACT Don Curlee at agwriter1@sbcglobal.net
