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Evaluating the ‘Magnetism’ of your Agritourism Operation – A Self-Assessment Tool

Doolarie Singh-Knights

Summary

Agricultural producers are capitalizing on agritourism as a direct-marketing opportunity because it affords authentic experiences that connects people to the environment and their local community, while generating income-diversification and cash-flow benefits.
Adding agritourism to an existing farming operation requires preliminary self-assessments that go beyond the ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy. Customers are the life-blood of an agritourism business, and purposefully attracting customers require that operators consider the preferences and expectations of customers and work to best meet these requirements.
This presentation walks participants through an agritourism assessment tool, offering a way to make a preliminary assessment about the ‘magnetism’ of the operator’s region and property – the extent to which they can attract visitors because of their attributes. The more magnetic the region and property are, the more likely it is to attract visitors and the more likely the operator is to develop a successful agritourism business.
This tool can help evaluate agritourism potential by answering pertinent questions - which regional and farm/property characteristics are important for a successful agritourism operation; how does ‘magnetism’ differ among operations; and what types of agritourism development strategy will work best for operators, given their farm and regional characteristics? Overall, this tool will help users understand an operator’s strengths and weaknesses relative to the opportunities posed by growing consumer demand for authentic agritourism experiences. Using this tool can help agritourism stakeholders and state entities generate risk management and market development strategies to differentiate their destinations through "localness" and place-based regional identity.

Details

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