The Best Crop For Agritourism, Multigenerational Trips, And More
Answering your agritourism questions!
Thank you all for your questions over the past few weeks.
I want to first apologize for any delays on our end for the pause in communication. Joseph and I have been working together on a few programs and projects designed to benefit the agritourism community in Uganda and beyond (including an international run in support of coffee farmers, a farmer-focused tourism company, and an internship program).
Interested to take part? We have some opportunities at the bottom of this letter.
Thank you for your patience, and now - onto the questions you asked!
“What are multigenerational trips?”
Earlier in the year we wrote about the travel trends for 2022. One of those was the increase of multigenerational trips.
This kind of travel is typically defined as travel with at least three generations of the same family - though it can include just grandparents and grandkids, too.
“What is conscious travel?”
In that same trends list, we mentioned the rise of conscious travel. This refers to tourists who are becoming more mindful of the impact they have as tourists when they travel.
That can mean the environmental impact (also called green tourism), or the personal/individual impact (on local communities that we travel through, restaurants that we eat at).
“What is the best crop to grow for agritourism?”
This has been the most challenging question to answer. The short answer is that the practice of agritourism is generally intended to add revenue through tourism to an already existing agricultural project.
If you are a farmer, tourism should be secondary to your farm because it is likely to bring in less consistent revenues than the yearly or twice-yearly harvest your crops yield. Working with groups of tourists may make for days, weeks, or even months where you enjoy more benefits (and beyond just financial ones), but since tourism is a sector sensitive to many variables, planting a crop just to attract tourists could be risky.
That being said, if you are looking for the crops that have touristic potential, we recommend looking through the lens of the three basic principles of agritourism:
Something for tourists to see - Whether your tourists are domestic or international, choosing a crop that they can see, walk through, and take pictures of is a great way to make sure their experience is memorable… and that they can share that experience after the fact.
Speaking in extremes, a farm of just potatoes growing underground might be considered less interesting than one with coffee plants and cherries of various colors hanging from the leaves.Something for tourists to do - Consider the space you have, as well as what you could develop. The activity could be as simple as walking the land and seeing your different crops, or it could be as involved as planting coffee seedlings, harvesting coffee cherries, and roasting coffee (I’m a bit of a coffee tourism specialist, if you couldn’t tell!).
When thinking about the crop, think about how it is processed and how much of that process you can engage tourists in. With apples, for example - is it enough to just have tourists come and pick them? Or could you also set up a cider press? In this way, think of the products made from your produce and see how you might be able to create that process in your farm.Something for tourists to buy - As both a way to conclude a tourist’s experience and help them to share their experiences later on, making sure they have a way to buy something to take with them is important.
With potatoes, could you have homemade potato flour? Or home-roasted chips or crisps? With coffee, what about unroasted green beans, roasted beans, and ground beans?
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Hopefully these helped to answer some of your questions. As always, if you have any others, feel free to send them along.
If you would like to connect with us on some of the opportunities mentioned above, please get in touch. These are two we’d love for you to consider:
If you are a farmer developing an agritourism project in Uganda and you would like to be featured on a new website we are developing, please send me an email.
If you know a student interested in interning with the Agro-Tourism Association this summer, whether you live in Uganda or wish to stay in Uganda, please get in touch. We have a number of opportunities opening up and would love to consider people in our network.
Warmly
Alex & Joseph
P.S. I am beginning a new weekly report on tourism trends and tourist insights called The Tourist Report. You can read the announcement by clicking here - I hope you’ll sign up!