Agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales are increasingly used as diversification strategies to generate additional farm revenue streams. Yet despite their growing importance, the impacts, interactions, and adoption of these strategies remain poorly understood. Here we use univariate and bivariate local Moran’s I statistics to identify agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales hotspots in the United States and a Seemingly-Unrelated-Regression Spatial Durbin Model to examine the association between agritourism and direct farm sales to consumers. We find that agritourism and direct sales reinforce each other within the same county but not consistently across neighboring counties.

Agritourism is a consumer-driven innovation that producers are exploring as a means to diversify and grow farm-based revenues. In order to help guide management and policy decisions, we conduct an exploratory spatial data analysis and find that travel infrastructure, region and rurality, characteristics of the local economy, and proximity to outdoor attractions are all significantly associated with the probability of a county being an agritourism hot spot. Mapping our primary spatial analysis’ residuals, we further identify counties with unique agritourism market conditions as a starting point to identify best practices that other regions interested in agritourism development might follow.

Using a national farm survey, this study estimates a logit model to identify factors affecting U.S. farmers' participation in agritourism. Of the dummy variables, public access to the farm for recreation has the greatest positive impact, followed by farms near central cities, farms in Rocky Mountain and Southern Plains regions, farmers with college education, farmers paying for farm advice, farms organized as partnerships/corporations, farms enrolled in conservation programs, and farmers with access to the internet. Continuous variables affecting participation include acres of owned land, percent of land unsuitable for crops, operator age, and distance to cities. Targeting farms and farmers with these traits can increase the success of agritourism promotion efforts.

Virginia's growing agritourism industry provides additional income to farms and mitigates risk. This study empirically analyzes the effect of demographic, operational, and financial factors on the profitability of agritourism operations using a primary data set collected from a survey of more than 500 agritourism operations. Results show that greater profitability is associated with operators who are motivated by additional income and have more education, larger operations with a greater percentage of income from agritourism, and visitors who spent more on average. Characteristics having a negative effect on profitability are wineries, locations farther from interstates, and difficulty accessing capital.

The transition from agricultural producer to agribusiness entrepreneur is littered with obstacles not associated with traditional farming operations. Producers are typically faced with an established market for their products as well as defined production practices and budgets. These familiar industry institutions are not available for use in the agribusiness environment. As a result, entrepreneurs are faced with new, unfamiliar situations that can significantly affect the success of their proposed or fledgling business.