Getting started in agritourism
The following is an edited transcript of a webinar on Getting Started In Agritourism presented by regional tourism development consultancy Tilma Group for The Australian Lavender Growers Association (TALGA).
Louise Bickerton
Hello and welcome. My name is Louise Bickerton and I'm President of The Australian Lavender Growers Association (TALGA). I’m glad you could join us for our webinar on getting started in agritourism.
About TALGA
Before we jump in, I want to tell you a little bit about our lavender growers association. We have member farms from all over the country growing lavender, distilling essential oil, or processing flowers, and making successful businesses out of this amazing plant.
For the past 30 years, TALGA has been here to support our members with advice, encouragement and access to trusted information. We love bringing people together at our annual events and we're always working on helpful online resources like this webinar tonight.
We're lucky to be joined by our guest presenters, Linda Tillman, managing director of Tilma Group, and her colleague Kushla Gale. They're consultant specialists in regional tourism development and are here to walk us through the ins and outs of agritourism, something that can add real value to your farm business that can be complex and difficult to manage without the right advice and support.
Linda Tillman
Thanks, Louise.
About Tilma
Tilma Group is a boutique consultancy that specialises in regional tourism development. Although we're based in southern Queensland, we’re often travelling around regional and rural Australia working on projects right across the country. Our speciality is working with regional and rural communities to grow sustainable and competitive visitor economies, and we do that through many different initiatives, and we work with many different types of clients. We do strategic projects around tourism development, destination development right down to working with grassroots Mum and Dad operators – we have that broad spectrum of experience and great insight into the industry.
Agritourism is one of the key focus areas for Tilma because it presents a good opportunity in terms of product development in regional and rural destinations, and it's in high demand. We're currently delivering two exciting agritourism projects: one in Central West NSW for the Oberon, Bathurst and Lithgow Councils, and we're also delivering one in the Somerset region in southern Queensland. These projects range getting deep understanding of the planning legislation and what's possible in agritourism and what's not, and how to guide farmers through the development of an on-farm tourism experience through one on one mentoring.
We're pragmatic. We do lots of strategy work, but what we love is the activation. We love working with operators to see exciting tourism developments and outcomes.
Farmer-focused content
This is a farmer-focused webinar – we've designed the content specifically with farmers in mind. We want to give you practical tips for your agritourism journey.
It's not focused on destination managers - there is a webinar we did for Economic Development Australia that's focused on agritourism development for destination managers, and that's available on the Economic Development Australia member website.
Participants in the webinar shared what stage they are in their agritourism development journey.
I will hope that this webinar will start to help you understand the important steps that you need to take in order to successfully develop a tourism on-farm tourism experience. What is agritourism? What does it mean? What does it look like on my farm? How do I do it? It's a somewhat daunting journey, but an exciting one because tourism is a fun industry.
What is agritourism?
Agritourism is a term that can be a bit confusing. Some work has been done in recent years to develop a consistent definition. Australian Regional Tourism have created a national definition that agritourism is a type of experiential travel which connects people to produce delivered on farming land through an on-farm experience. Essentially agritourism connects guests or visitors with the farm, with the farmer, with farm activities, and with farm produce.
It's important to note that the purpose is not to replace agriculture. Agritourism is about supplementing farm income and supporting the viability and resilience of agriculture on a commercial farm. It's great opportunity to provide a pathway to market, or it can add value to the produce that comes from that farm. It's also a great opportunity to leverage farm assets. Agritourism offers farmers opportunities to generate additional income. It allows farmers to diversify operations, and build business resilience.
Credit for all images: Tourism and Events Queensland
Elements of agritourism
There are three key elements to agritourism. To be acknowledged as agritourism, an experience must be delivered on-farm and include one or both of engagement with people and/or produce. If it's not on a commercial farm that's rural tourism. The definition is important because we don't want agritourism to impact on the amount of productive agricultural land that we have in Australia.
Types of agritourism offerings
A lot of people when they think agritourism, they think about farm stays, but there's so many different experiences that sit within agritourism: there's food tourism, farm gates and wineries, farm tours, brewery and distillery visits, educational experiences and active participation experiences like pick your own experiences, and cattle drives.
We often see that farmers will dabble in one experience type then over time, they may add more experiences and start to build on the visitor experience that people can have when they come onto the farm. So it's not necessarily just one particular area that you have to focus on.
When we think about lavender farms, because that's what we're here about to talk about, photography is an important offering, and whether that is for amateur visitors to take photos on their phone to share on social media, or professional photographers that will arrange photo shoots for special occasions – they're always looking for beautiful backdrops for things like weddings, engagements or family photos. Photography can also act as a promotion – you can having professional photographers on your farm or influencers that can provide marketing opportunities for your farm as well.
Then we have what we call supporting agritourism services – these are not classified as agritourism because they're not on-farm, but they add depth to the agritourism appeal of your destination. That encourages visitors to stay longer and spend more if they've got more things to do – things like farmers markets, food festivals and food trails, local cafes and restaurants that serve local produce – they add to the agritourism experience within a region – they're part of the ecosystem. In tourism in regional and rural destinations, we need density of product to be able to attract visitors, as often they need to travel a bit further. So we want that density of product to be able to appeal to them.
Trends in tourism to incorporate
Now I wanted to share with you a few things to consider in designing an agritourism experience. These are things we are seeing from a tourism perspective that are important – to create memorable and immersive experiences on your farm. Authenticity is critical. Don't try to be something you're not. This is what I love about agritourism is that farmers are genuine, down to earth people that just want to share their story. Don't try to be something you're not. Visitors are looking for real, meaningful experiences, and even what we would refer to as transformational experiences - they want to feel like they're contributing to the greater good, they want immersive experiences. What we mean by that is they want to get their hands dirty. They want hands on experiences, they want personal experiences. They don't just want passive experiences where they're observing or watching.
If you think about that from a lavender farm perspective, they want to pick their own flowers, make their own lavender oil, feed the farm animals. They want to be involved. People also want to learn. They want to learn and understand what you do on the farm, how you do things, why you do things that way, and that lends an opportunity to empower our visitors, empower our visitors how to recognise quality, empower and educate our visitors on using Australian lavender and on supporting local farmers. Think about how you can enable those types of opportunities for people.
Sustainability is important as well – research that demonstrates the importance of sustainability is Booking.com’s user survey – they've identified that 80% of travellers want to buy sustainable travel experiences.
There's big growth in demand for nature based and wellness experiences, so if you've got lavender fields, imagine holding wellness retreats.
Think about what the trends are, what travellers are looking for in experiences and make sure you're meeting their needs and expectations. This is important to consider in the early stages when you're designing the experiences that you're going to be offering visitors. Or if you've already got experiences, how could you bring these elements into them? How are you evolving and meeting those needs of your guests or visitors?
Think about your agritourism story. Think about what's special or distinct about the agricultural industry and the environment within your local area, because we don't want to just do what everybody else is doing. Think about how you've got a close connection to the story of your local agricultural industry or your local place.
Find a unique hook and be different. Don't copy neighbours just because they've created something successful. Look for the gaps and the opportunities to create something that's different and unique and that is special for you and for your farm.
Economic benefits for farmers from agritourism
There are great economic opportunities in agritourism for farmers. The demand for agritourism and on-farm experiences is growing. research shows it's a real growth opportunity for regional and rural economies, and in addition to that, it can also bring great economic value to a family and to a community. Tourism is a great industry to be in.
The spend on tourism is continually increasing and it is a growing industry. It is a higher yield opportunity for farmers. The value that agritourism brings does vary depending on the type of offering that you have and also the region you are in. Agritourism can bring to you as a farmer and a family income, productivity and jobs. People want to use tourism as a diversification opportunity because it provides an opportunity to keep the family on the land. It presents an opportunity to remove off-farm income generation for one of the partners or children. It does present exciting opportunities and often it can be easier to make money from tourism than from farming, and it can offer a more stable cash flow.
There's some exciting opportunities there to be had in terms of new income, diversifying the income, spreading risk, enabling adult kids to make a living off the farm, building customers and there is a flow on benefit to local businesses, through the shopping that you and your visitors are doing locally - maintenance, laundry, etc. That’s called the tourism multiplier effect that flows on through to your local community and local economy.
Social and environmental benefits from agritourism
In addition to economic value, we can't ignore the many social and environmental opportunities that agritourism also brings to regional and rural communities and farming families. And strong social wellbeing leads to strong economics.
Examples include an opportunity for farmers to have social contact, particularly farmers in more remote locations that can feel isolated. It can support conservation efforts. It provides the opportunity for farmers to share their stories around how they do farming about their conservation efforts and that creates pride. It can inspire future farmers and also allows us to share positive, good stories about ethical and sustainable farming practises in Australia. And for a community, it can improve liveability.
Cost benefit analysis
So lots of great benefits, lots of exciting opportunities in agritourism, but it's important to know that whilst we have great benefits and great opportunities with agritourism, it's not for every farmer, and it's not for every farm, and that's important for you to consider.
What I'd like to encourage you to do after the webinar, is sit with the family and do the quiz in Australian Regional Tourism’s Farmers Guide. Do it with the family because this has to be something that you do together. It askes questions to get you thinking if agritourism is right for you as a farming family, and then it's got a few things for you to consider in terms of is the farm suitable for agritourism.
We can talk about all of the benefits, but there are also some challenges that you need to navigate in business. So it's important for you to consider the potential risks and the costs and not just get excited by the benefits – the cost benefit analysis. We encourage you to think about what the costs are, what are the risks associated with it, assess that against the benefit or the opportunity to determine the cost benefit analysis.
I want you to share what challenges or risks did you experience up to now or if you're new and you haven't yet started on the journey, what are some of the things that you're worried about? What are some of the things that you're scared in terms of risk or challenges?
Participants in the webinar shared their concerns and barriers.
What we do sometimes hear from farmers is that kind of fear of tourism having to be always on, as in people are going to be coming onto our farm all the time. It's going to distract us from our core business of farming. But you can block out times when you're open and when you're not, so you can be seasonal and not operate during your peak farming season, for example.
In terms of distance from where visitors live, we've got to give people a reason to come. If you've just got one agritourism business sitting in isolation hundreds of kilometres from a major population base, you might struggle unless it's something totally unique, exceptional, ‘must do’ type of experience. We recommend working in collaboration, getting other farmers working in agritourism working as a collective and creating a density of product that will attract visitors out. And don't everybody offer the same product – create that wider experience for people.
Six early considerations in agritourism development
Now what I want to do is take you through and hopefully give you some tips and advice on how to deal with barriers. We're going to cover off on six things that we always encourage farmers to consider before committing to tourism as the next diversification opportunity .
We haven't got them in any kind of order as such, because some of these things you'll do and then you'll come back to the other thing and they kind of all happen a little bit at the same time so you've got all of the information and the insight to be able to make an informed decision around the cost benefit analysis of agritourism for you and your farm.
Research
The first thing you need to do is research. Many farmers already have an idea of what they may like to do on their farm, and that could be a farm stay, a wedding venue, farm tours, whatever it may be. However, we encourage you to talk with your local tourism or economic development manager at your Council and to your regional tourism organisation, because they'll help you understand what the gaps and the opportunities are within your region for you to take advantage of. For example, they might say, we need more luxury accommodation experiences on farm. We've got a gap in that area. They may say, Our region doesn't need any more wedding venues – we’re at saturation point. They can give you some good insights into the current situation in terms of what already exists and where the gaps are and what visitors are looking for in the region. That will help you plan and adjust your thinking around what type of experience you want to offer. They can also help you find relevant tourism information, such as statistics on the region’s visitors.
Another thing is benchmarking – looking at what other agritourism operators are offering – and don't just look locally. Think of all of Australia – who is leading the way in on-farm experiences, what places have you seen that are doing it well? Who inspires you? It could just be for certain little aspects you might go, Oh, I love this particular farm experience because they do this or that well. But I also love this farm experience because they do that well. Start to find experiences that you are inspired by and talk to the owners, and learn from them. Connect with those other agritourism operators to understand, what are the most profitable offerings that they have? How do they set their prices? Where did they get helpful advice from on their agritourism journey?
Define and get to know your target market or your target markets because ultimately you're creating an experience for them. you need to think about how to meet their needs, and that's where your Council or your regional tourism organisation can assist with that. Knowing your market and who you're designing the experience for is critical.
Connect with the tourism industry
We encourage you connect with the tourism industry – agritourism support sits outside of the industry you're familiar with: agriculture. Most agricultural organisations are not familiar with agritourism and don't have a lot of support resources in that space. Hopefully that will change.
Agritourism support sits within the tourism industry, so one of the biggest things that will help your agritourism business is input from the tourism industry. They can give you information on resources that are available to assist you, so make sure that you take the time to meet with your regional tourism organisation, build a relationship with them, sign up to tourism industry newsletters from local and regional industry bodies, including relevant ones such as a caravan and camping association. There's a global organisation called Global Agritourism Network for anybody that's interested in getting involved in agritourism.
Plan out your offering
Another thing that you need to do is plan your offering. It's so interesting as you work through the process as to what you can learn. Don't treat agritourism as an extension to your farming business. Follow the steps as though you're starting a new business – take calculated risk. Think about the goals that you want to achieve: how much profit do you need to generate or want to generate, how much contact with guests do you want to have with visitors, do you want to be totally hands off or do you want to be right in there and connecting with them and sharing stories? What are your skills and capacities? Think about these things as you define your offering, and keep in mind that as you work through the development in the early stages. When you have different conversations with people, you may tweak it.
Think about how you can create a year round offering when you've got a seasonal flower display? Doing a competitor analysis is good. Look at their target markets, their pricing, how they do things. How can you be different?
Get financial advice, such as on tax implications, or setting up a separate business structure. Consider a phased development. Can you start with something that's low cost to test and trial initially without a major capital investment? Taking the time to do a business case and marketing plan.
Find out if you can get insurance or need to tweak your idea
One of the first things to do is look into insurance – get advice from an insurance broker to see if you are able to find insurance for the agritourism offering that you want to do. Some insurance brokers are quite supportive of agritourism and some aren't. So if you feel like you're having a conversation with an insurance broker and they're telling you that everything's impossible, we encourage you to talk to another insurance broker and get a second opinion. You might need a separate commercial public liability for your agritourism offering (separate from your farm park public liability).
Please don't see insurance as a barrier. This is just part of the process and part of finding out what is possible to offer and what is not? You might have a conversation with an insurance broker and they might say that something's hard to get affordable insurance for, such as quad biking, horse riding, getting in paddocks with animals, etc. If you are given that information early in the piece, it means that you can tweak your offering.
There's often ways to reduce risk to gain insurance for what you want to do. Write a risk management plan before you reach out to any insurance providers for insurance. They want to be able to see that you've considered the risks and you've also mitigated or eliminated risks. That's going to help you in terms of progressing any insurance conversations.
Find out if you need to tweak your idea to secure planning approval
Another thing to do at an early stage is investigate planning approval. Have some early conversations with your Council. You want to make sure that what you're offering is compliant. A bit of a tip is not to go directly to a Planning Officer but go through your Council’s tourism or economic development manager because their job is to enable development, whereas the planning department’s job is to enforce the law. If you can get your Council’s economic development or tourism manager involved in that conversation, it might smooth the pathway a little bit for you.
You might want to engage a private planning consultant to help you through that process. They essentially have the same skill set as Council planning staff, but their job is to help you find a way forward. You still have to follow the law, but they can help you navigate compliance pathways. Getting that approval is critical to successful agritourism development because you don’t want to be in a position where there's any risk to the farming business because something's not compliant (insurance won’t cover you if your offering is not compliant).
Please don't see this as a barrier. It's information gathering and it will help you in the early stages to understand what's possible and what's not, and to finesse your vision or your plans accordingly. You don't want to get 10 years down the track and then realise something's not right.
Build your tourism skills
The final thing we encourage you to do in the early stages of agritourism development is to build your skills. Tourism is very different to farming, so building your skills is helpful. There's free training, often provided by regional and state tourism organisations. There is so much online to learn from as well, such as how to market your business, how to create an experience, how to sell via travel agents by paying commission. Your Council or regional tourism organisation will be able to point you in the direction of resources.
How RedGround used tourism training to grow their business
An example of using the support of the tourism industry is Jill from RedGround truffles. Skill development in tourism was extremely beneficial to her agritourism journey. She established a relationship with her council's tourism manager who told her about an upcoming training workshop that was being done by the state tourism organisation, and that was a catalyst of learning and training and growth and development for Jill. Because she attended this training workshop, the state tourism organisation was keen to support her. Jill did some state-based training. She then went on and did an online tourism trade ready program which allowed her to learn how to sell her product with commission – a new marketing distribution channel. That means that she could sell her offer her experience through travel agents, through tour operators, and through online travel agents like Booking.com. Jill then went to the Australian Tourism Exchange, a travel product expo where there's international buyers and Australian sellers (tourism operators) that come together as a result of that, she now has lots of bookings for the next six months.
Taking the time to build skills is going to be extremely valuable on your agritourism journey, so I encourage you to take the opportunity and advantage of the extensive support that exists within the tourism industry.
Where to find resources
When we talk about support, there are some fabulous national and state resources. We've compiled a state by state list of the different resources and tools and networks available to support farmers on their agritourism journey. There's some great resources in there and there's some fabulous people working across the country supporting farmers on their agritourism journey at the moment, so make sure that you explore those opportunities.
Kushla is going to share a couple of more great case studies to inspire you all this evening.
Kushla Gale
The first is Windy Acres Farm, a lavender farm near Toowoomba by Alicia Vohland. There's a couple of great takeaways I learned from a presentation she did on the early years of development of agritourism on her new lavender farm. What she offers is a farm shop in a shipping container, beautifully painted with a great mural with lavender products such as soap and honey. She has open day events She's only open for a few months of the year for visitors and she starts her season with a donation based Easter egg and educational scavenger hunt for families and 5,000 people attend. She's got workshops and classes for adults. That's include beekeeping basics, honey harvest, and agribusiness and agritourism startup workshops.
She leverages the nearby Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers, which is massive, and during that festival she runs events like floristry classes and sunset yoga classes and the festival promotes them as part of their program which brings all the visitors to her farm for her. Lastly, she's got children's activities – honey harvest, interactive workshops, sensory experiences in the lavender fields, a seed bomb workshop and a native bee hotel workshop.
The two key learnings that I learned from Alicia is she tested and trialled a whole lot of agritourism offerings to figure out which had the best return for the effort that she had to put into them. So, for example, a business advisor helped her see that it's a lot easier to sell a $180 ticket for a beekeeping course than it is to sell $180 worth of soaps. So nowadays her farm shop is an add on for ticketed activities that she's running on the farm.
The second takeaway I learned from Alicia is, right from when she first bought this farm, which was a bare flat dirt field, she started developing a social media following about her journey and what she was doing. So many followers became invested in her family’s journey so when she finally launched her agritourism, people were there, ready to support her and come and buy from her. She says, Don't open the doors expecting people to be there waiting without putting in the effort to raise awareness.
Our last case study is the annual Kalbar Sunflower Festival, also near Toowoomba. It's held on a lucerne farm, started by Jenny and Russell Jenner during a drought because sunflowers are something that are quite drought hardy.
It's only a three day event, but this year it raised $160,000 for charity, and last year it made over $130,000. That shows how easy it is to make money from tourism compared to making money from farming (though people are generous with fundraisers).
The festival has sunflower fields with fifty photography props in the field so people can take photos. There's a sunflower maze, a sensory garden, a fairy garden, a pick your own sunflowers area, a children's hub with an animal petting farm and free art and craft activities and free face painting and tattoos.
There's an entry fee to enter and a whole bunch of add on experiences that people can also purchase. There's a Devonshire tea marquee and other food to buy. There's art workshops and flower crown workshops. There's photography shoots. There's three long lunch events and a gala dinner, helicopter flights, yoga in the sunflowers, and they sell sunflowers obviously as well.
Another nice thing that they do is it's accessible for people with mobility disability. So there's a long wheelchair accessible truck and also a raised viewing area. Your agritourism offering should be accessible – it's compulsory by law, but it's also a huge market – people with disability are about 20% of Australians. It's worth making your business accessible so they can come visit you and spend their money with you.
Louise Bickerton
Linda, that was fantastic. Thank you so much. So comprehensive.
I'm not familiar with the job title destination manager? How do we find them? What do they do?
Linda Tillman
A destination manager is essentially somebody that works in managing tourism. That could be Council, but all councils are different and it depends on the size and scale of Council. In Council, the role is sometimes in economic development, but there might be a specific tourism team, so just finding out who within your local council looks after tourism development. Sometimes if Council's not playing a role in tourism, that destination manager role may sit with the regional tourism organisation.
I would suggest the first point of contact is Council and they will be able to plug you into the wider networks.
Louise Bickerton
OK, good advice, because mostly our experiences with Council is from the planning department. So we've got to sort of get over that barrier, find the right people to talk to. I did like your advice to contact the Economic Development Officer first.
I want to thank Kushla and Linda once again for collaborating with TALGA to present this. Thank you everybody for joining us tonight.