Agritourism is a widespread and busy sector of tourism. However, even in countries with well-developed and mature tourism cultures, it is often one of the least regarded areas both in terms of the public’s knowledge of it, as well as of sector-specific management. The reasons for this are threefold.

First, since agritourism is often a part-time occupation or a smaller percentage of a farm’s income, there is a tendency for it to be seen as a supplementary activity or hobby-business where practitioners have, until relatively recently, largely been left to market and develop their products themselves. Second, if tourists want to visit the countryside, stay in rural or farm accommodation and indulge in the kind of leisure opportunities that are often facilitated from or on a farm, these visitors were – again until recently – relied on to make most of those arrangements direct with the supplier, often at short notice or as footfall trade.

The third and key reason is that because agritourism has been relatively recently recognised as a tourism sector, many resources that are now regarded as agritourism are also major resources of other more developed tourism or leisure sectors. For instance, horse riding, much of which will be facilitated from a farm, is central to equine tourism; similarly fishing, a huge leisure sector, is often practised on farm-managed ponds or riversides; while many farms participate in the holiday parks sector by offering camping and caravanning sites on their land.

Since agritourism has been defined as a tourism category, the sector has undergone significant development and can now offer formalised products reliant on sophisticated marketing and management techniques. An agritourist today can book in advance a five-star B&B online, direct or via an agency, and enjoy tours and excursions in safe accredited environments, while agritourism management has gone from an almost ad-hoc and at-need basis towards meeting the needs of a high-value sustainable tourism sector.

Agritourism combines agricultural resources with holiday, entertainment and leisure pursuits. Generally, agritourism businesses are conducted by farm enterprise owner/managers and can involve any agricultural operation or activity capable of bringing visitors to a farm for leisure and/or education, promoting the farm’s products as well as generating additional income.

The following is a typical working definition of agritourism from the American Farm Bureau Federation (2004):

Since in agritourism many of the resources that can be ascribed to agritourism by most definitions turn out to be resources that also belong to other sectors, in practice this often means that agritourism is identified with a wide range of other tourism and leisure sectors. The characteristic featured most often that separates agritourism from other such interacting sectors for example nature tourism, heritage tourism, fishing, equine tourism, food tourism, etc is that where an overnight stay is included, an agritourism holiday usually covers accommodation in a farm or countryside village environment.

Another characteristic of agritourism is that operating in the sector advocates a proactive approach. Until agritourism was defined, tourism into the same rural areas was previously largely passive ie suppliers relied on tourists to make their holiday arrangements direct. Nowadays agritourism operators employ proactive techniques such as sector-specific marketing agencies, package agritourism products such as specialised tours and excursions, seek certification and quality assurance, and make produce for agritourism shopping, for example, souvenirs, rural crafts and farm products.