Tourism Hell

Didn't do so much today. Hauled garbage to the dump, cleaned the car, a little mild cleaning. Scored 17 eggs this afternoon. Dodged tourists all over the place. Speaking of which, these folks live not too far down the road from us. I like the whole agritourism concept, as long as it doesn't involve tourists:

November 23, 2007
Down on the Farm With Your Sleeves Rolled Up
By EMILY BIUSO

AT an early morning hour most vacationers would spend unconscious, a few intrepid city dwellers outfitted in borrowed boots hunch over a creek full of watercress, carefully cutting the plants with kitchen scissors.

For their hosts, farmers in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, it’s the start of a regular workday. But for the visitors, it’s a delicate balance between learning on the fly and trying to be of use on a working farm.

Hoeing, seeding and picking may not sound like a holiday, yet the appeal of agritourism is gaining in the United States. More and more people want to see where their food comes from, and the same drive that leads them to visit farmers’ markets or join community-supported agriculture farm-share programs draws them to the farm itself.

“I shop at the farmers’ market, but I didn’t really know how these people operate or how a farm functions,” said Elizabeth Schafer, who works for a visual-effects company in Los Angeles and decided to visit Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, N.C., after a year of working 50-to-60-hour weeks. “It definitely made me appreciate what needs to be accomplished to put food on the table.”

The arrangement at Maverick Farms is simple: vacationers pay $120 a night to stay in a room in the hosts’ beautiful two-story, 125-year-old farmhouse, and they are also invited to work at harvesting, seeding and other chores. For each hour of labor, $7 is deducted from the bill. Up to 25 percent of the bill can be worked off. At night, the farmers cook dinner from food they grew, and the guests/laborers are encouraged to join them. At the end of the stay, visitors can, if they like, leave a donation for the food they’ve eaten.

Agritourism includes a wide variety of farm activities. Though most visitors simply spend an afternoon picking fruit or feeding animals, others remain several days, contributing labor to tasks ranging from planting crops to building greenhouses.

In Vermont, income from agritourism totaled $19.5 million in 2002, nearly twice the amount in 2000, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Though there are no similar statistics for more recent years, agritourism leaders in the state say the figures continue to rise. In North Carolina, 46 percent of agritourism operators surveyed by the state Department of Agriculture reported an increase in income in 2004 from 2003. And in Tennessee, agritourism enterprises directly added about $17 million to the economy in 2006 and bring in more than three million visitors a year, according to the state agritourism coordinator.

“It’s grown because more farmers are finding out it’s an important avenue to bring in revenue and stay on the farm,” said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames. “Secondarily, it’s increasing because we’ve moved to an experience economy. People want to have a farm experience.”

Melissa Gunderson is a chef and caterer in Norcross, Ga. She, her husband, Eric, and their two young sons, Sam and Benjamin, visited Maverick in September. Since their stay, Ms. Gunderson has noticed a new appreciation of eggs by 3-year-old Sam. When she cracks one open for a recipe, he remembers seeing them up close in Maverick’s chicken coop. “I’m so shocked he remembers that experience,” she said.

MAVERICK FARMS is a working farm that was started by five novices in 2004, all friends in their 20s and 30s. Three had grown up on farms, but none had experience running one. They began it to help preserve family land from development, and important components of the farm’s daily practices are reducing waste, saving energy and fostering local involvement whenever possible. Boarding tourists who want to learn about farming has always been part of the business model.

“Agritourism is an incredible education tool,” said Tom Philpott, a co-founder and co-director of Maverick who also writes about food and farming for the environmental Web site Grist.org. “This is a way to come and do a typical afternoon on a farm. Maybe somebody does this, and it sparks something.”

Mr. Philpott was first exposed to farming when he traveled around Italy and stayed at agriturismos. In Italy, such projects have been supported by the government since 1985, and farmers receive tax breaks to play host to visitors. It’s a much more robust industry there and elsewhere in Europe, and many American farmers and educators have traveled abroad to see what methods can be imported from the Europeans.

Beth Kennett, the owner of Liberty Hill Farm in Rochester, Vt., accompanied Senator Patrick Leahy on a 1998 trade mission to Ireland and saw how agritourism was done there.

“In Ireland, they consider this economic development,” she said. “It put a whole other spin on it for me. I thought: ‘This is real. This is a business model. We can emulate this in Vermont.’”

In the mid-1990s, Ms. Kennett, other local farmers and the University of Vermont Extension Service formed the Vermont Farms! Association to organize agritourism in the state. After the trip with Senator Leahy, the association received an agritourism grant from the Department of Agriculture, according to Ms. Kennett, who is now the association’s chairwoman. Today, it offers training, support and marketing to farmers and provides guidance to associations in other states.

Jill Adams of Adams Farm in Wilmington, Vt., and secretary of Vermont Farms!, is a fifth-generation farmer on her family’s land but not the first to welcome paying guests. In the 1880s, her ancestors put up families from New York who sought a retreat from city life. Her parents, William and Sharon Adams, closed off the farm to concentrate on dairy farming in the early 1970s, but in 1980 they decided to diversify and bought a team of Belgian draft horses to pull sleighs filled with visitors around the farm.

The popularity of the rides and interest in the farm led the Adamses to take the government’s offer to buy their whole herd of cattle as part of a federal program in 1986. The family was no longer in dairy farming, and they began to focus on agritourism and marketing their maple syrup and other products directly to consumers. In 1992, Jill Adams reopened the farm to the public. She now has more than 10,000 visitors a year. In addition to the sleigh rides, visitors can milk goats, gather eggs from the chicken coop, watch sheep herding and see yarn being spun.

Good story, if a bit "safari-like" on the part of the writer. Not sure I'm in agreement with the phrase "intrepid city dwellers" if it involves cutting watercress. This was the story that made me see red -- I mean, WTF? And why can't there be an acronym for "Who Gives a Shit?" Maybe WGAS?

November 25, 2007
Tightening the Beltway, the Elite Shop Costco
By ASHLEY PARKER
WASHINGTON

RICHARD PERLE said he was game for a reconnaissance mission.

Mr. Perle, the neoconservative and former adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, offered to walk through his local Costco, pointing out the products that he said were increasingly drawing D.C. power shoppers like himself.

That Richard Perle? The gourmand with a home in Provence who once dreamed of opening a chain of soufflé restaurants?

Yes, Mr. Perle proudly shops in Costco’s cement warehouses stocked with three-pound jars of peeled garlic and jumbo packs of toilet paper. And he has no problem serving the store’s offerings to dinner guests.

“Because it should have been Dean & DeLuca?” he asked, sounding half incredulous and half amused. “I really think there’s a socio-cultural thing here, and people are entitled to their pretensions.”

As a recent article in Vanity Fair lamented, the days of glamorous Washington dinner parties are long gone. Indeed, some hostesses today aren’t above serving Costco salmon, nicely dressed up with a dollop of crème fraîche.

Mr. Perle said he shopped at Costco once a week when he was in town, and at a dinner party he held recently for several colleagues and friends, most ingredients were from there — the beef for his daube à la Provençal, the limes for his lime soufflé. The salmon for gravlax — also from Costco. He said he always received compliments, and he always got double takes when he told his guests where he shopped.

He’s not the only D.C. host or hostess to go big box.

“I do it — Costco all the way,” said the writer Sally Quinn, who is known for the power salons she puts on with her husband, the former Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee, at her Georgetown town house. “I just started.”