By Owen Roberts
Global tourism is on track to recover to pre-pandemic levels. That’s great news to people like Francisco Betti, Head of the Global Industries team at the World Economic Forum. At a forum meeting last May, he gushed about this encouraging trend and its potential impact on farms and rural communities.
“This year is a turning point,” he says. “We know the travel and tourism sector has the capacity to unlock growth and serve communities through economic and social transformation.”
North America is part of this trend. Last summer, researchers from Penn State and the University of Maine published a report noting that the total income generated from agritourism and recreational services nationally grew by almost $310 million between the 2017 and 2022 Census of Agriculture. About 28,600 US farms and ranches earned an average of $44,000 in gross revenue from agritourism ventures.
The same goes for Canada and Mexico. In Canada, the agritourism market is predicted to grow 12.9 per cent a year between now and 2030, reaching revenues of about CDN$900 million. And in Mexico, agritourism generated a revenue of US$121.3 million in 2024. It’s expected to reach US$237.9 million by 2030.
Farm experiences spark story leads for agricultural journalists. Angles abound: How do growers get a piece of the action? What are some success stories? And how do municipalities prevent agritourism from overwhelming services? Rural infrastructure is not growing at the same rate as agritourism. In fact, stories have emerged about some rural residents pushing back at what they consider overcrowding near their normally tranquil, placid homes.
For answers, consider the wildly successful experience of Switzerland.
Swiss people are agritourism pioneers, having the foresight to manage and market their country’s beauty long before the term agritourism was uttered there or elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that Swiss dairy farmers there receive buckets of government cash to graze handfuls of Swiss Brown cows on steep, cleared alpine hills and mountainsides. These quaint, idyllic scenes are what tourists want to see.
Swiss agricultural journalists are well aware of agritourism’s draw. In fact, agritourism was a theme at the 2024 International Federation of Agricultural Journalists congress, held in Interlaken, Switzerland, with 200-plus participants from 40 countries.
With support from PIF, I was fortunate to participate with eight of my University of Illinois Agricultural Communications students, on our first study abroad program to an IFAJ congress. The students were welcomed by congress participants; IFAJ doesn’t have a formal student program, but it dedicates significant resources to youth development and recognizes the need to nurture the next generation of agricultural journalists and communications professionals.
A highlight of every IFAJ congress is countryside tours. Our group chose the excellent “innovation meets tradition” visit to eastern Switzerland. We came away with these agritourism nuggets.
Find a niche, control crowds. The Bächlihof adventure farm and excursion, open year round, hosts 500 events a year and up to12,000 visitors on a weekend during harvest. It offers 24 apple varieties and 22 pear varieties. Colorful seasonal pumpkin figures, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Dracula, are its niche. This year the farm started charging admission to control crowds. It also reduced its pumpkin exhibition season from eight weeks to four weeks and started bussing customers from a common parking area to the exhibition site to ease local traffic congestion.
A blessed roll in the hay. Weary pilgrims trekking to the alleged tomb of the Apostle St. James traverse the Tschümperlin dairy farm, which offers them a relaxing night in a modified hay loft, promoted as “sleeping on straw” under a Swiss army blanket. Patriarch Franz Tschümperlin fluffs the hay bedding and maintains the facility, which hosts about 150 travelers a year. His son Urs joins guests at breakfast for marmalade, cheese and bread. Food and lodging: 28 Swiss francs each.
Massage for a cause. For an hour each morning and evening, Sepp Dähler immerses a medium-stiff handheld brush into a mixture of brewers’ yeast and water and scrubs the hides of his 20-ish cattle herd. They appear to love this “massage,” as he calls it. So does his animal-welfare conscious urban clientele that pays handsomely for his beef. Other fans of his include a local tannery that claims the hides are well conditioned for custom leather handbags and shoes.
A whopping 13,000 of Switzerland’s 48,000 farms are direct marketers. Fruit and vegetables are the most popular commodities, followed by eggs, wine and beef. High returns sound attractive to entrepreneurial marketers. But as tour guide and family farmer Melanie Graf points out, this kind of agritourism requires grit.
“It’s very work intensive,” she says. “You have to focus your business entirely on it and work in a highly professional manner.”
But given the way agritourism has taken hold in Switzerland, it looks like no one’s being deterred by the work.
– Roberts is an agricultural journalist and director of agricultural communications at the University of Illinois. Portions of this article were previously published in his monthly column in The Grower.
Editor’s Note: This series on the 2024 World Congress of Agricultural Journalists was developed by members of the Agricultural Communicators Network who received grants from the Professional Improvement Foundation to help fund their travel to Interlaken, Switzerland.
Copyright 2023, Agricultural Communicators Network.