Agritourism offers a taste of farm living
Posted on Sunday, May 25, 2008
PETIT JEAN MOUNTAIN — Ed Martsolf, bespectacled and weathered with a thick peppery beard, works the scenic meadows of this mountain near Morrilton. The views are panoramic and the road seldom traveled.
One recent afternoon, Martsolf was pushing around a wheelbarrow near his barn. His niece was filling jars with honey, unbinding brochures and firing up PowerPoint. It was a quiet afternoon, and then....
A 40-foot tour bus rumbled up, with all the attendant squeaks, squeals and smells. It crunched the white gravel drive in front of Martsolf ’s shop, and dozens of tourists stepped onto his farm.
“What we are setting out to do is to become their farm, their vicarious farm,” Martsolf, 61, said as he prepared for the visitors.
These tourists — many were Kentucky farmers — arrived to learn how Martsolf is able to draw outsiders to his land.
A native of Pennsylvania, Martsolf is one of a few Arkansas farmers engaged in agritourism and communitysupported agriculture, a new economic model for farming. His business is based on honey and meat sales, but he drives it with intense marketing on multiple platforms. His hours are split between the open pasture and the tunnels of cyberspace.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute at Petit Jean Mountain, just down the road, is trying to persuade more Arkansas farmers to do the same thing.
In agritourism, farm visitors experience the rural life firsthand, either through helping out with chores, picking their own produce or just taking a hayride. Community supported agriculture consumers buy shares of the farm and get choice produce for their membership.
Direct selling like this keeps more farm dollars on the farm — and in the rural communities — but there are challenges. For instance, insurance com- panies demand high premiums to mitigate the risk of visitors hurting themselves.
Still, if widely practiced, the economic benefit to rural communities and the state could be immense, advocates say. For one thing, it could slow the migration from the rural areas to the urban, blunting a decades-long movement away from the land.
By mid-July, the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute expects to publish a Web-based marketing list of agritourism sites in the state. It is participating in think groups and holding community meetings to encourage agritourism. Recent meetings in Morrilton, Clarksville and Marked Tree have attracted 30-35 farmers each. The next meeting is June 26 in Marianna. “It’s not something that has to be built. It’s not something that takes bringing in people,” said Joe Foster, the institute’s program coordinator and the man coordinating the current agritourism push in the state. “It can all be developed from within. It’s already there. There are farms all up and down these roads. There are people with great knowledge of farming, and people with great knowledge of rural life. And there are people willing to share it all.” And here’s the kicker, Foster said: Plenty of city dwellers will pay for it.
ARKANSAS’ PUSH Some states have hired tourism officials specifically to promote agritourism, but Arkansas doesn’t earmark any money for its promotion. Still, Arkansas ’ tourism marketers are trying to promote it.
The Department of Parks and Tourism is encouraging farmers to take free hospitality training paid for by the state. The classes are to help groups to better understand and handle the public. In the past year, 500 people were trained in hospitality across the state and from many industries.
“We are trying to boost the agritourism right now. We are trying to put special emphasis on that,” said Donna Perrin, tourism development manager with the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.
Most modern farms get money from selling goods to wholesale markets or specific distributors. From there, the cost of the goods goes up as they move through the supply chain to retailers nationwide.
The problem with this model, critics say, is the farmer ends up with a disproportionately small cut of the action — 10 cents to 20 cents per dollar of product sold at market. While it takes a bit more work and ingenuity, farmers who can attract customers to their land to buy products can net up to 80 cents per dollar sold, after subtracting marketing costs.
“We are very excited about it. We think there is a lot of potential in [agritourism ],” said Kristine Puckett, tourism development consultant for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. “It’s beneficial for the farmers because it is bringing in an additional source of income. A lot of towns don’t realize that that is a resource to tap into.” Between 1974 and 2002, the number of Arkansas farms fell from 50, 959 to 47, 483, while the average farm size increased from 287 acres to 305 acres. The situation was similar in the United States, which lost 185, 000 farms during that period, the U. S. Department of Agriculture reports. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has resulted in less contact between consumers and the people who raise the nation’s food, some say. “Over the last few generations, there has been such a disconnect between rural and urban, and you’ve got kids and even adults living in the urban areas that don’t know anything about farms,” Foster said. “Even though their grandparents probably grew up on a farm, they don’t know anything about it.” A SHARE OF THE FARM Much of the growth in agritourism and community supported agriculture since the 1980 s has occurred in the lush valleys of central California and near the organic farming hubs of New York, Wisconsin and Washington state.
Bob McKellar, 76, owns Family Farm Fresh in Ivanhoe, Calif., a community supported agriculture operation that supplies about 300 baskets a week of various fruits and vegetables. The produce comes from several family farms.
In all, the farmers grow 320 different crops throughout the year. Members pay $ 25 upfront, and then between $ 19 and $ 46 for various sizes of baskets of produce each week that they want one.
“It seemed like we ought to be selling oranges directly to the consumer and eliminate the middleman,” McKellar said in a recent phone interview.
Nationwide, the number of community supported agriculture operations has grown from about 60 in 1990 to 1, 700 in 2004, according to the California Institute for Rural Studies. Local Harvest, an Internet database of farms, claims more than 1, 900 community supported agriculture members in the nation. The Robyn Van En Center at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., puts the national number closer to 1, 200.
According to the same sources, there are between four and eight community supported agriculture operations in Arkansas.
Membership in Martsolf ’s farm costs $ 2, 080 a year. For that fee, members receive a “share” of the farm, and regular deliveries of beef, pork and lamb meat. The cost can be broken up by month ($ 185 ) or by week ($ 55 ), but the concept is the same. Farm members also get first choice on whole milk, pasture eggs and raw milk cheese when available, according to Martsolf’s brochure.
“A lot of people want to set up a lemonade stand and call it agritourism. What we’re looking for is those people who believe in the practice of the farm to the point where they will buy into a membership in the farm,” Martsolf said. “In the purest form, it is a partnership between the customer and the farmer, where the customer is a co-producer.” Mike Jordan, 58, a retired architect, is starting a community supported agriculture operation behind his suburban home in Bentonville. He collects rain from his roof and uses organic methods to grow about 100 varieties of plants in his backyard. He has about 35 people on his email list and plans to sell shares next year.
“We can grow our food in a small area,” he said, “and we can grow enough to support others who either don’t have the time or don’t have any interest in growing their own food.” He estimates that his garden can produce enough vegetables for a family of five, plus 10 more people.
Though agritourism and community supported agriculture hold the potential to increase incomes on farms — even very small farms — whether those approaches will absorb a significant percentage of domestic food production is yet to be seen. Large industrial farms still produce most food consumed by Americans.
“I don’t envision that kind of approach really addressing the general population,” said Frank Jones, associate director for extension at the Center of Excellence for Poultry Science at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “It’s a great approach. People get fresh vegetables that are raised according to the kinds of values that they have, and it does provide for the land. When you start looking at the population and how much land it would actually take if everyone was associated with that kind of thing, it would not feed the general masses,” Jones said. To date, little research has been done on the economics of community supported agriculture and agritourism.
CHALLENGES The Heifer International ranch near Perryville operates a community supported agriculture business that serves customers in Little Rock. Ryan Neal, 25, manages 10 acres of organic crop production on the farm, which is nestled in a valley of the Ouachita National Forest. “The idea that I came here with was to learn how to run a CSA,” Neal said recently, taking a break from the fieldwork. “It’s just a lot different doing it out here than reading it in a book.” Part of the difficulty of running a community supported agriculture business, or any farm that supplies a number of crops, is getting in tune with its individual cycles and temperaments.
To supply weekly produce to the 50 shareholders who have bought a stake in the Heifer ranch, the crops have to be intensively managed to ripen in a staggered manner throughout the growing season.
Another challenge to getting into agritourism or community supported agriculture involves liability. If a paying visitor gets hurt on a farm, there are few laws protecting landowners.
“The main thing that anyone should know is that when you invite the public to your farm, you have to make the environment safe,” said Jane Eckert, an agritourism consultant with Eckert Agrimarketing in St. Louis.
In Arkansas, the recreational use statute was written to encourage landowners to allow the public to use land and water areas.
If no fee is charged for the land use, the landowner assumes no liability for injuries incurred on the land. Not so when the landowner gets paid, said Harrison Pittman, a professor at the UA-Fayetteville’s National Agriculture Law Center.
Billie Stamps, an agent with Renner and Co. Inc. in Fayetteville, an independent insurance agency, said few insurers will write an agritourism liability policy. “No one wants to do it,” Stamps said. “That type of risk, there’s not a market out there that will take it. The ones that will, like Lloyd’s of London or Admiral [Insurance Co. ], have a minimum premium of $ 15, 000.” Pat Ford farms just north of London, 10 miles outside of Russellville, and lets customers pick their own fruit on his land. “I just make sure everything is safe, we have plenty of shade. I kind of keep an eye on the folks out in the field,” Ford said, noting that he carries insurance to limit his liability in the case of a lawsuit.
To contact this reporter: dirvin@arkansasonline. com Community supported agriculture at a glance Findings from study by the California Institute for Rural Studies in May 2004: n ! Community supported agriculture (CSA ) farms are located in all 50 states, with the largest concentrations in California, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Washington. n ! The overwhelming majority of CSA farmers are of European descent. A 1999 survey of CSAs found that “nearly 97 percent of the farmers listed their ethnicity as White / Non-Hispanic.” n ! CSA farmers are significantly younger than U. S. farmers in general. The farmers ranged in age from 23 to 50, with a mean age of 40, compared with a mean age of 54 for farmers nationwide in a 1997 USDA report. n ! CSA farmers were evenly divided between men and women. In contrast, the 2002 Census of Agriculture found that only 27 percent of principal farm operators were female. n ! Unlike most farms, which produce a limited number of crops, CSAs offer members a diverse range of products. Consequently most grow between 50 and 70 crops during the season. SOURCE: California Institute for Rural Studies Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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