Develop Your Own Farm Tourism Concept

As a relatively new part of the wider tourism sector, farm tourism is a great way to enable the agricultural community to diversify what they are offering and to develop new revenue streams. This can be extremely important as a way of supplementing a farm income through tourism activities, and can be a very viable way of increasing farm sustainability.

These are some of the ways in which farms can expand their reach:

• Offering accommodation - from yurts to luxury lodges
• Developing farm tours
• Creating special events e.g. food tasting, educational classes
• Working with external events companies to rent out land
• Selling farm produce to the public
• Creating a cafe or restaurant 

This course takes you through a vast array of different ideas so, if you are:

• A farmer looking to expand their offer
• Business owners looking to work with farmers on joint ventures
• Land owners wanting to utilise their land more effectively
• Someone who already has a tourism offer but wants to manage it more effectively

then this is the course for you! 

Lesson Structure

There are 8 lessons in this course:

1. The Scope and Nature of Rural and Agricultural Tourism
   • Background and History of Farm Tourism
   • Forms of Agribusiness for Managers and Farmers
   • Agritourism Beyond the Farm
   • Types of Agricultural Tourism
   • Possible Issues
   • Animal Welfare
2. Creating an Agritourism Setting
   • Planning Your Offering
   • Resource Management
   • Selecting Target Markets – Market Segmentation
   • Marketing Approaches
   • Legal and Health & Safety Requirement
3. Managing an Agritourism Business
   • Managing the Physical Resources
   • Managing People
   • Setting up and Running a Farm Shop
4. Agricultural Tourism Accommodation
   • Styles of Accommodation
   • Costing Accommodation
   • Maintenance
   • Farm Tours and Activities
   • Identifying Major Target Groups
   • Tours Within the Farm
   • Tour Schedules and Bookings
5. Designing and Conducting Tours and Activities
   • Creating and Delivering Activities
   • Creating Activities Outside the Farm – Mobile & Online
6. Agritourism Events
   • Types of Agricultural Events
   • Planning for an Agricultural Event
   • Phases of Delivering an Agricultural Event
   • Dealing with Event Issues
   • Managing Visitor Access
7. Marketing and Promoting an Agritourism Business
   • Introduction to Customer Relationships
   • Customer Care Policy
   • Customer Care – Levels of Involvement
   • Effective Communication
   • Dealing with Complaints
   • Self-Evaluation
   • Maximising Customer Service
   • Importance of Market Research
   • Analysing Costs and Benefits
8. Special Project - PBL – Design a Farm Tour Activity Problem-Based Learning Project

Aims

• Determine agritourism prospects for a property or wider community in a rural area.
• Identify and plan development of potential agritourism attractions.
• Explain critical tasks that require management in an agritourism enterprise.
• Compare options for providing accommodation facilities and services for agricultural tourism.
• Explain some of the considerations for designing and conducting various activities for agricultural tourism, including farm tours.
• Explore the diverse activities possible for agritourism and your region and globally.
• Identify the most appropriate agritourism marketing tools to effectively promote your business.
• Create and present a plan with specific strategies for integrating an element of farm tourism into the operation of an existing agricultural business.

What You Will Do

• Find and investigate marketing materials that promote agritourism.
• Observe behaviours of the animals in agritourism and consider the animal welfare.
• Identify potential hazards in agribusiness including how event organisers mitigate hazards.
• Perform a S.W.O.T. analysis to help identify the events Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats in an agritourism business.
• Investigate the creation, sales or service of a food product related to an agribusiness, such as a café, food truck or road-side stall.
• Research how and where you might go to recruit staff for your business including seasonal workers such as backpackers or fruit pickers.
• Consider the physical and safety resources required to run an agribusiness.
• Identify utilities and furnishings that you both consider to be essential and non-essential.
• Identify of costs associated with the accommodation (budget, intermediate and luxury) and estimate amounts for each.
• Explore and experience virtual or mobile farm tour activities.
• Create a mind map for an agritourism event that you would like to run.
• Identify the apparent success of an agritourism attraction based on observations such as potential income and public interest.
• Research examples of advertising for agribusiness events in your area (billboards, signs, pamphlets, tv or radio advertisements, email etc) and conduct a cost benefit analysis, considering things like longevity, reach, target audience and monetary cost.
• Integrate theoretical information to derive sensible solutions to potential problems involved in integrating farm tourism.

WHAT IS POSSIBLE?

Possibilities for farm tourism are endless, but profitable possibilities may be far less.  If you want an agritourism venture to have the best chance of success, and minimal risk, you should choose what you do carefully, and plan well.

Before pushing forward with opening a new agritourism attraction it is very important to ensure that you have done some homework first. It can be a very expensive mistake to not do this and can have a big impact on success. This is part of looking at the feasibility of your concept, and this is the start of developing your business and marketing plan.

1. Find out if there is a demand.
2. Identify the target market.

This positioning guides all other marketing decisions, e.g. pricing, product assortment, advertising, services. If you try to offer 'something for everyone' you can end up satisfying no market well. You may need to do customer research to find out what tourists (or tourism companies) want. You may need to change your image or change your target market.

A farm business that sets up an agritourism activity without doing their research first may be planting seeds of opportunity, but if they’ve misjudged what tourists want, they’ll be waiting, fruitlessly, for tourists until the cows come home. 

So, ask yourself:

• What part of the local rural tourism market share do you want?
• Are you growing or supplying the right range of products to cater for the tourists you want to attract?
• Are you producing tourism-related goods or services that will suit those tourists?
• Are you researching a market before you start promoting your new product/service, so you know you will be able to access the tourists you want?
• Where does your product/service sit alongside other local rural tourism activities? Is it a high-quality offering, could you command a high price? Or are there so many other farm tourism activities that you feel compelled to offer the same as others?
• What makes your proposed product/service special?
• What kind of records will you need to keep in order to inform future decisions about your farm tourism activities?

WHY STUDY WITH ACS?

There are lots of reasons why you should join our course, here are a few:

• Developing business ideas can be complex, especially if that isn't your area of expertise, so let this course take you through the different steps
• Making the right decision about how to diversify can be overwhelming, this course will help you to explore a variety of different options
• There is the opportunity to put your ideas in to practice through the creation of your own project, get feedback on your business idea to help it progress 
• You will be supported throughout the course by our subject specialist tutors, who will be there to provide guidance and answer any questions you have
• As the course is designed to be studied flexibly, there is no need to stop your other commitments, they can all work together at a pace you set