AgTour Connections Newsletter

McGrath always charges for tours of his diversified organic farm, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles and right off Highway 101. He offers walk-up tours starting from the farmstand for a minimum of four people. $7 per person buys a 25-minute walk, and $5 pays for a 15-minute visit with the animals. McGrath says most people are happy to pay for time with the farmer in the field, but the walk-up tours do take a little more work than organized groups because you have to have someone on hand, working not too far away and available to talk to people.

Three years ago, 4,000 students from Los Angeles Unified School District visited McGrath Family Farm, financed by grants. This year, McGrath is hosting groups from inner-city schools in Watts every month and is waiting for word about funding from the CDFA Specialty Crops Program to pay for more student field trips to the farm. He suggests that farmers who would like to host school field trips contact school districts directly to learn about such programs.

McGrath sees the tour business as a perfect fit for growers who are already involved in direct marketing. Farm tours, he says, are seasonal like anything else. 90 percent of his tours are in the springtime, and 90 percent of the tours are elementary school children. Fall is all about Halloween. Coming up soon are the pumpkin tours. For $4 per child, the pumpkin tour includes a hay ride, a visit to the corn maze, and a small pumpkin to take home. "It's a lot of fun," McGrath says.

Helene Marshall has been showing curious people around her bee-keeping and natural, gourmet honey production operation since she started selling at farmers markets, but soon found out little beekeepers on tour

that this took valuable time away from the other million things that needed attention. Ten years ago she started charging minimum of $100 for a group of up to 20 people, and formalized the tour a little bit to include a honey and food pairing and a small sample to take home. After she looked at the numbers and realized that she was hiring extra staff to deal with the tour groups, she decided that the price was too low. She now sets the price high enough to have a little wiggle room, such as being able to offer free tours to clients of one of her best customers and negotiating lower prices for shorter tours or lower-income groups when needed.

The Marshalls now do tours by reservation only, and on limited days. Sunday tours, offered twice a month for $25 per adult or $10 for kids, are 2 hours long and include a 20 minute film (produced by the National Honey Board), a honey and food pairing, tastes of up to 25 varieties of honey, a look at an opened beehive, a taste right out of the beehive, and a demonstration of extracting and bottling the honey. The up-to-20 tourists group tour is now $400, by appointment, on weekends only. School group tours are available on Wednesdays and Thursdays, at either 10 a.m. or 1 p.m. for a minimum fee of $250. Marshall estimates that 40 to 50 paid customers per month take the tours during the March through October season.

Marshall says, "Farmers often forget to put a value on our time, and that's the one thing that we don't get back." Although tours of Marshall's Honey operations are not a huge money-maker, they are never a loss.

More farm tour suggestions.