I went to the NAFDMA Convention this week. Our company started 14 years ago with a focus on endurance events, and over the past few years we have expanded into the ticket market. Our ticket platform is particularly good for multi day, timed entry outdoor events, and farms have become one of our initial areas of success. That said, we are just beginning to truly understand this new market, and I was struck at how important agritourism truly is.
It is especially hard for family farms to remain operational from farming alone. At NAFDMA, I heard so many stories from farmers for whom agritourism has allowed them to remain economically viable. As an example, Hugh McPherson grew up on Maple Lawn Farms. When he came back from college, he understood that he needed to find a way to create new revenue opportunities if the farm was to support the expanding family. He was an early pioneer in hosting events on a farm, creating a park and a number of events. As he created attractions, he expanded that into helping other farmers expand into the event business. If his family had just stayed siloed in farming, the business would not be as economically viable today.
To put it bluntly, without agritourism and events, many family farms would not exist today, further reducing an important facet of America.
The other, even more notable way that agritourism is important, is that it provides venues and activities that bring people together. Today, we all spend too much time on our phones, living in a virtual word. Farm attractions and events provide a wonderful way to get together with friends and family and have fun.
This is a vibrant and growing business. At the show it was fun to learn about all the various businesses providing equipment and services to farms. Below are a few more stories and pictures.
Lilliput Play Homes builds fun houses that builds fun houses for kids to enjoy when they visit a farm.
Harvest Hosts provides a network of RV owners with farms, wineries and attractions. Over 200,000 RV owners pay an annual membership fee to find and connect with places they can park their RV for free. This provides farms with a new source of visitors who attend their attractions, buy their merchandise, and provide valuable word of mouth marketing. A wonderful network effect of cooperation.
Unger Company provides a wide variety of packaging to farmers to provide a professional and custom look for their produce. Visitors to farms major buyers for the produce and baked goods a farm offers, improving margins over a distribution network of middlemen to reach a grocery store. This direct farm to consumer approach saves money for consumers as well.
Calico Cottage provides all the equipment and material for farms to have their own fudge!
My Farm Marketing helps farmers create all sorts of promotional material as well as help with strategies to grow attendance. There were a number of firms like this helping farmers grow their agritourism business.
Harvest Tyme Farm created a Dino Tyme farm event in the summer several years ago. They have branched out to provide other farms rental and purchase of their dinosaurs. Some of these dinosaurs reach 3 stories tall and some have animatronics built in.
Characters Unlimited provides human, chicken and even Zoltair animatronic figures to farms. This farmer even talked to me!
Art Through Hammer Productions creates pumpkin sculptures and carvings for Halloween fun. Matt showed me some pictures of his creations, like giant bunny rabbits made of pumpkins and other creations like the colorful toadstools behind him in this picture.
As you can see from the above examples (and there were literally over 100 booths of creative suppliers), the agritourism business is growing and vibrant.
Of course, there were also around 8 ticket vendors there, all of them with a longer history of supplying farms with technology. After talking with many of the people at the show, I believe our technology focused approach to solving real problems – like family friendly pricing, sales tax, financial reporting and full free email and websites – will help some farms in the coming years. And I am feeling good about our investment in this new market for us because of the vibrancy and good things that come from agritourism – saving family farms and providing opportunities for people to gather and have real life fun.