This year, global tourism is on track to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Restless travelers are fed up waiting for COVID to disappear (it won’t); they’re spreading their wings and seeking adventures. 

That’s great news to world leaders such as Francisco Betti, head of the Global Industries team at the World Economic Forum. At a forum meeting in May, he gushed about this encouraging milestone and its potential impact.

“This year is a turning point,” he says. “We know the travel and tourism sector has the capacity to unlock growth and serve communities through economic and social transformation.”

Agritourism is riding this wave. Statistics Canada expects the Canadian agritourism market to grow at a compound annual rate of 12.7 per cent between now and 2030, reaching revenues of about $900 million. People are looking for what can be broadly called a farm experience.

So how do growers get a piece of the action? 

And equally important, how do you prevent agritourism from overwhelming your services? Rural infrastructure is not growing at the same rate as agritourism. Globally, and even locally, rural residents have pushed back at what they call overcrowding in a normally tranquil, placid place.

For answers, consider the experience of Switzerland. Swiss people are agritourism pioneers, having the foresight to manage and market their country’s beauty long before the term agritourism was first uttered. It’s no coincidence that dairy farmers are paid buckets of government cash to graze mere handfuls of Swiss Brown cows on steep alpine hills and mountainsides. This is what tourists come to see.  

Agritourism was a theme at this year’s International Federation of Agricultural Journalists congress, held in Interlaken, Switzerland, with 200-plus participants from 40 countries (including Canada). I was fortunate to be there with eight of my students, and after an excellent “innovation meets tradition” tour of eastern Switzerland, we came away with these agritourism nuggets.

Find a niche, control crowds. The Bächlihof adventure farm and excursion, open year round, hosts 500 events a year and up to12,000 visitors on a weekend during harvest. It offers 24 apple varieties and 22 pear varieties, but colourful seasonal pumpkin figures, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Dracula, are its niche. This year the farm started charging admission to control crowds. It also reduced its pumpkin exhibition season from eight weeks to four weeks and started bussing customers from a common parking area to the exhibition site to ease traffic congestion.

A blessed roll in the hay. Weary pilgrims trekking to the alleged tomb of the Apostle St. James pass by the Tschümperlin dairy farm, which offers them a relaxing night in a modified hay loft, promoted as “sleeping on straw” with a Swiss army blanket. Patriarch Franz Tschümperlin fluffs the bedding and maintains the facility, which hosts about 150 travelers a year. His son Urs joins guests at breakfast for marmalade, cheese and bread. Food and lodging: 28 Swiss francs (CDN$45) each.

Massage for a cause. For an hour each morning and evening, Sepp Dähler immerses a medium-stiff handheld brush into a mixture of brewers’ yeast and water and scrubs the hides of his 20-ish cattle herd. They appear to love this “massage,” as he calls it.  So does his animal-welfare conscious urban clientele that pays almost $100 per kilo for his beef, and a local tannery, that claims the hides are well conditioned for custom leather handbags and shoes.

A whopping 13,000 of Switzerland’s 48,000 farms are direct marketers. Fruit and vegetables are the most popular commodities, followed by eggs, wine and beef. And while the retail prices sound attractive to marketers, tour guide and family farmer Melanie Graf points out, this kind of agritourism requires grit.

“It’s very work intensive,” she says. “You have to focus your business entirely on it and work in a highly professional manner.”

But the way agritourism is growing, it looks like no one’s being deterred by the work.