by Gary Digiuseppi
Special to Arkansas Agriculture
A new program at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute hopes to help Arkansans carve out a niche in the $1 billion agritourism business.
In a study entitled “Farm-Based Recreation: A Statistical Profile,” Dennis M. Brown and Richard J. Reeder of USDA’s Economic Research Service estimated the annual income from farm-based recreation as of 2004 at $955 million. About 2.5 percent of all farms in the country, some 52,000 farms, offered recreational and entertainment-related activities ranging from hunting and fishing to petting zoos, horseback riding, and on-farm rodeos.
About half of those farms involved in agritourism are in the South, the study revealed. With the help of a $50,000 Rural Business Opportunity Grant from USDA’s Rural Development Office, the WRI is conducting a pilot project to study the needs of farm-based recreation operators in a six-county region of the Arkansas River Valley.
WRI Program Coordinator Joe Foster says they’ve “kind of taken the lay of the land,” visiting some 45-50 of those operators. “They’re pretty diversified,” he says. “There are people who are pecan farmers; there are berry farmers; there are pumpkin patches, trail rides; there are honey farms — you name it.”
The Rockefeller Institute, he says, has been asking the farmers “where their successes have been, what their failures have been, what kind of support system they would like to see formed in the area locally and also at a statewide level, because many of them feel like they’re just kind of out there on an island by themselves. They’re isolated; they know agriculture, they know farming. They don’t know the potential that lies with knowing a little bit more about planning the business end of it and planning the marketing side of it.”
One of the pitfalls to agritourism, Foster says, is trying to do too much too soon.
“You have, let’s say, 20 acres of land, and you say, ‘I can do a pumpkin patch, and I can have hayrides, and I can have school groups out every week.’ You don’t realize that to do that, it takes trained personnel; it takes insurance, which is extremely expensive for a lot of these enterprises.”
It’s important for the first-time entrepreneur, Foster says, to find and focus on a niche; peripheral activities can be developed from there. “People just want to have something fun to do and something unique to do,” he says. “You don’t have to be everything to everyone.”
Foster says the project grew out of a forum they hosted in July of 2006. The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute would seem an ideal place for such a conference; covering 188 acres atop Petit Jean Mountain, the Institute was originally part of the late governor’s homestead and model cattle farm. Now, it’s part of the University of Arkansas System and is dedicated to the study and anticipation of changes in society and to developing programs that act as a catalyst for ideas, policies and activities to make life better in Arkansas.
The 2006 forum brought together representatives from about 30 state agencies and organizations for a daylong event to talk about agritourism and its potential for Arkansas.
“We brought a few farmers to the table and had them tell their stories about how they went from production agriculture to diversifying their farm income by adding agritourism to their businesses and inviting the public to come to their farms,” Foster says.
Next came the grant and the pilot study, which is being conducted in Pope, Perry, Johnson, Logan, Conway and Yell Counties and is being assisted by several other partners.
The National Agricultural Law Center, which is part of the University of Arkansas School of Law, addresses legal and liability issues. The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism has provided input on what amenities operators can offer to enhance the experience for their guests and encourage them to come back.
The U of A Division of Agriculture, through its Cooperative Extension Service and Agricultural Communications department, has also contributed.
Between them all, says Foster, they “help provide answers to … every question that these farmers have to ask regarding the business side of things, the marketing side of things, and the hospitality side of things. Also, they help find where grant funds might be available to help them make it through another year or actually prosper in the long run.”
The on-farm visits and interviews with entrepreneurs in those six counties have helped the WRI begin to build a database of agritourism sites; with the help of the Extension Service, they’ve compiled a list of about 350, not just in those counties, but also across the state. They hope to develop a printed version for tourist reference; the Agriculture Communications department is also helping build a web site. Foster says it will include profiles of the operations and contact information; he says, “It will kind of be a cooperative marketing campaign for all of these people to help them out, to give them another avenue to get their names out there, and to get their enterprises recognized by people who might not normally see this.”
The producer looking to start an agritourism business, says Foster, should start by doing a kind of “feasibility analysis” — assess your facilities and the knowledge and expertise held by you, your family, and your employees. Then, he says, go out and talk to other farm-based recreation operators.
“A lot of people have relied heavily on people who have been doing this a long time,” he says. “We’ve identified a number of people who have been doing this for years without any kind of support who just kind of said, ‘This sounds like a great idea.’”
The Institute hopes to help in that regard, bringing together the newcomers and the experienced practitioners in the field.
From those first meetings, WRI has continued to conduct town forums, bringing together farmers and local business people to brainstorm about the potential in their area for agritourism development. “Through these meetings,” says Foster, “we’ve really discovered a lot of people who previously were really unknown to county agents and to people in Chambers of Commerce in certain localities, people who somehow got word of these workshops and wanted to come and find out more about it for themselves.”
One of the findings of the USDA-ERS study was that the further a farm is from a city of at least 10,000 people, the more likely it is to have a recreational business. Foster says their research finds many low-population states, like Arkansas, have viable agritourism industries.
“We still are a predominantly agricultural state,” he says, “and we have people that really have strong heritage and ties to the rural life. A lot of them have kind of fallen into the urban way of life and have kind of found this disconnect between the rural way of life many Arkansans remember from generations ago, to the fast-paced urban setting we see now in Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas.”
The ERS study also found most farms with agritourism enterprises are physically large; the median size is 3,100 acres. Farms larger than 1,000 acres also have the highest per-farm median recreational income. In some cases, says Foster, new operations need outside financing, but other producers have been able to use existing resources without any additional financial strain; he says those farmers tell him, “It’s something that we were kind of already built for, but we just never really realized it.”
Although many long-time operators say their recreational enterprise is “just kind of something that keeps me on the farm,” Foster says brand-new ventures, if properly planned and marketed, can move to a net profit within a couple of years. “A lot of the positives outweigh the risks,” he says. “If you look across the country, this is just a growing, budding industry.”
With Arkansas’ abundance of natural amenities and its rich agricultural history, agritourism seems like a natural for the Natural State.
“We have so many farmers in the state who have such a great working knowledge of the agricultural industry,” says Foster. “If you combine that knowledge with a little bit of best practices involving business and marketing, an agritourism site anywhere, regardless of it being right outside of a densely populated area or down an old country road, can be extremely successful.
“I think that where there’s a will, there’s a way. It might sound cliché, but there’s a great potential for it. There’s a great deal of success already taking place, and there’s a great deal of success to follow.” |