Sure, sure you can do a farm tour. But how about goat yoga? Festivals? Air BnBs? Bailey Myers, the Director of Marketing at Owyhee Produce in Parma, Idaho, appeared on a recent episode of Western Growers’ Voices of the Valley podcast to discuss how she helps diversify her farm’s revenue stream via agritourism offerings.

Ann Donahue, Director of Marketing and Communications at Western Growers: Let’s start out with the basics – what do you guys grow and where are you located?

Bailey Myers, Director of Marketing at Owyhee Produce: We are located right on the border of Idaho and Oregon – we have farmland and packing facilities in both states. We grow around 13 different crops ranging from asparagus, watermelon, sweet corn, all the way down to onion, sugar beets and corn.

Ann: Tell me a bit about your background in agritourism.

Bailey: Agritourism is something that I actually went to school for in Hawaii. I got my degree with an emphasis in agriculture education and hospitality and tourism. I knew from the beginning that that’s where I wanted to focus my attention when I came back to the farm. When we have family who want to come back to work on the farm, we ask them to grow their operation when they come back – bring something new, whether it’s a new way to focus on a crop or a new way to bring revenue in. We’re always working on expanding and challenging our own individuals.

I’ve always been someone who loves education. Give me any course or any class and I’ll take it. But I also am really passionate about agriculture. I spent a year traveling Oregon and teaching in different high schools in ag programs. It sparked this interest of how can I educate in a fun way that’s memorable and how can our farm be a part of that?

Agritourism is pretty simple. You want to bring people to a farm and create something memorable. Something even as simple as going to a pumpkin patch, which most people do nowadays, is agritourism. Farm-to-fork dinners? Agritourism. The goat yoga that’s super trendy? Agritourism.

The industry has grown a lot, especially since the pandemic in 2020. Society just saw this need of ‘I want to know where my food comes from,’ but you also had to find a space to gather that was out in the open. That’s when we started our farm-to-fork dinners.

There’s this whole undercurrent of making sure that experience is as flawless as possible. If it’s a memorable event, whatever they learned from that event is going to be tied with that memory. You want to make sure that they walk away with something that’s beneficial, whether it’s, Oh, I didn’t know that we had bison that was local, or I didn’t know that onions could be cooked in this way. You want them to take away something that’s positive with that memory.

Ann: If a grower is listening to this and is like, ‘You know, I’ve thought about doing this before, but I have no idea where to begin.’ What do you think are the best first steps that growers can take in order to start an agritourism business?

Bailey: Step back and be like, ‘Okay, what can I offer? What are my regulations?’ Those are the first two steps. Once you get an idea, you just have to run with it.

There’s a farm locally where they do field trips and tours where you can go and learn how to set a siphon tube. As a farmer, I don’t care to set another siphon tube. [Laughs.] I’ve done it before. I’m terrible at it. My husband’s great at it. You know, we don’t want to do it, but to most people, that’s a great skill to learn and it’s fun and memorable.

Ann: What are some of the hoops you needed to jump through to set up agritourism programming?

Bailey: A lot of them come from food safety. We opened up our field of asparagus to the public to come and pick it. If you go back to one of [my brother] Shay’s videos [on TikTok], we had an issue getting our labor workers here one year and our crop was just going to go to waste without them, so we were trying to figure out a way to not have so much food waste and benefit the community. We had 6,000 people show up to pick this field. And what most people didn’t understand is we had to train them just like an employee. We had to go through our food safety training. We had to go through how and what not to do and what to wear. And there were people that came that we had to turn away. Like ‘You can’t wear jewelry into the field and you can’t have long nails on’ and all of these different things – and people were like, ‘This is crazy.’

But it’s a great opportunity for them to understand you’ve got to follow these guidelines. We’ve seen the benefit of people having the chance to come and learn from the farm. They buy local, they want to support local, they know why things cost more, they’ve done the labor, they see the labor, so in turn it does equal out, but those hoops are big ones to jump through.

Ann: So tell me about what else you offer as agritourism.

Bailey: We offer year-round tours on the farm. There’s always something happening. We’ll do mint tours. We’ve also done onion shed tours. We do an asparagus festival. We also have Air BnBs on the farm. We’ve had people that come and stay on the farm and they didn’t realize how dark it got at night without street lights, or how quiet it can be without roads. Most of the Air BnBs are actually farmstead houses. They’re houses that we have renovated but it’s a true farm style house. There’s nothing fancy. The one that we have right now that’s really popular is by the river, and we haven’t changed anything, so they still have sulfur water. If you don’t know what that is, it’s water that smells like terrible rotten eggs the first like five minutes that you use it. And we get a lot of comments on that, but our purpose in that is, could we try and fix it? Maybe. It’s pretty hard, but we also want people to understand that when you live in this area, this is what you have.

Ann: But I think authenticity is something that people really need to experience to bridge that gap between their own experience as somebody who drives to the grocery store and magically there’s all this produce in the produce section.

Bailey: Authenticity has become really a hot topic in the last few years. I want to say we’re like four or five generations removed from a farm, on average. Bridging that gap is going to be crucial in having American agriculture survive. We’ve got to educate. We’ve got to get to where people can trust not just the farmers, but the farming. When they can understand that, not only will it be easier for American farmers, but I feel like Americans and the consumers of all these products are going to be grateful that they know where things come from. That education almost gives people peace of mind.

You can listen to the whole interview on our Voices of the Valley podcast by clicking here.