Good day everyone and welcome back,
The 2022 Riverview High School Summer Agriculture Tour has sadly come to an end. We all have explored new horizons, made memories with friends, and been enlightened about various potential career opportunities. The agriculture industry, like most others, is not perfect but will always have demand - we need food to survive! Farmers traditionally profit from their product through selling locally or commercially. Another growing option for farmers is agritourism. According to the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), Agritourism is defined as, "a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and/or processing with tourism in order to attract visitors onto a farm, ranch, or other agricultural business for the purposes of entertaining and/or educating the visitors and generating income for the farm, ranch, or business owner.”
During this year's agriculture tour, we have visited some destinations that rely on agritourism as a source of income. At Red White and Blue Farms, they grow sunflowers, blueberries, and strawberries. They always do “you pick” events throughout each year depending on what time of the year the season is for a certain crop. The “you pick” event is when farmers have tourists pay a certain fee to give those tourists the advantage to harvest the crop themselves. Farms that only sell their crop through agritourism is benefiting both their business and the consumer because the consumer is educated on where the food is coming from (how it’s grown, how it’s harvested, etc…) and the business knows that the probability of their product being wasted is less than commercially selling it because at the end of the day, they know the product being sold directly to the consumer. It’s a win-win for both the consumer and the farmer!
This is Kieran checking out from the Ag Tour 2022 blog and I’ll see you in the next ag tour blog.
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