I know. My father was a small family farmer, and he could be surly to strangers. Otherwise, he was a jolly, cordial man.
But in his day, farming was a private family affair, and rural residents were unaccustomed to visits from total strangers.
Increasingly today, farmers are looking to agri-tourism as a means of staying on the farm, in many cases, the place where they grew up.
Richard Pressley inaugurated Moore County’s first corn maze this year. He carved a Carthage buggy into a corn field on his farm and opened the maze to the public. The maze attracted thousands in the two months that his daughter, Jennifer Bailey, managed the program.
Pressley and other family members helped with the maze on weekends, but the farmer continued to do what he does best: run a farm, raising such crops as corn and tobacco.
Few of us understand just how much courage and imagination it took for this farm family to make a change of this magnitude.
The very thought of opening the family farm to the public is a scary one.
The Pilot recently featured an account of three North Carolina farms with successful tourism programs. Each farm continues to raise crops and/or livestock, so it remains a real honest-to-goodness working farm. But in each case the farmers have changed their lifestyle to accommodate tourism, and that means welcoming strangers onto their land.
As one agri-tourism specialist put it, this is the way they hope to hold on to the land and keep their lives close to the soil from which come food and fiber. For many farmers, this means retaining land that has been in the family since the American Revolution. One way to retain the land is to hold a job outside the farm, something many farmers are doing.
Actually, tourism on the farm is not all that new. Several Moore County farms have long opened their property to the public for everything from pick-your-own fruit to tours by children’s groups.
As one who grew up on the farm but has lived in a city in adulthood, I must confess that I had forgotten how little city folks know about farming.
Every farmer has anecdotes.
Among mine is the visitor who kept looking into the trees for peanuts. He simply did not understand that the peanut is a legume, not a nut, and does not grow on trees. It is a root crop, the foliage from which makes good hay for livestock.
There was a cousin my age. She was no city girl, but she was unacquainted with cows and pigs. The pigs delighted her. What she really wanted to do was pet the pigs as if they were puppies or kittens.
All those memories came back on the agri-tourism tour.
Farmers and agri-tourism specialists reminded us that the public, children in particular, are rapidly losing any vestige of connection to the farm.
To many children, eggs come in cartons at the supermarket. The relationship to chickens is lost. Likewise, chicken is encased in plastic wrap, and it’s an understatement to call this a very sanitized version of the source of the poultry we eat. One farmer told of confusion about regular eggs and unfertilized eggs. Forget sex education. Youngsters apparently don’t even know the basic details of reproduction, whether human or avian. Small wonder so many teens are surprised at unexpected pregnancies.
The trend toward tourism on the farm is welcome. There is no question, but that this is one way to keep farm families on the farm and to keep farms in operation.
More and more farmers are selling out to corporations and to other farmers, a practice that leaves us with few small family farms. In their place are huge corporate farms.
It’s a sad trend. Although agri-tourism is a wonderful concept and I welcome it, I regret that farmers must turn to yet another sideline just to stay in business and continue to till the soil.
This is Farm-City Week, an observance staged jointly each year by the Cooperative Extension Service and the Chamber of Commerce. On Monday night they will host a banquet and awards program at the Agriculture Center in Carthage.
The idea is to introduce farm families and city folks to each other and to celebrate their interdependence.
As the proclamation adopted by the county commissioners says, it’s an effort to close “a widening gap of misunderstanding.”
Farm-City Week is the time when collard greens meet golf courses.
Contact Florence Gilkeson at florence@thepilot.com
