Some tourists flock to California to see Hearst Castle, Sausalito, Big Sur and the Golden Gate Bridge. Then there are those who come for the breathtaking views of artichokes.
"I want to talk to you about artichokes," said Evan Oakes, founder of Ag Venture Tours, possibly the country's first company specializing in agricultural bus tours for tourists. "In Egyptian tombs, in Syria and Babylon, they were talking about artichokes."
While artichoke tourism may never rival Disneyland, Oakes, a 41-year-old agricultural research scientist, may represent the Next Big-to-Medium-Size Thing. His bus tour, a sort of 4H for Dummies, is part of a growing national trend toward agricultural tourism. It is a day-long, fact-filled 97km or so gambol through "the nation's salad bowl" -- the Salinas Valley -- the fertile fog-layered land made famous by John Steinbeck. Here, about 50 percent to 75 percent of the country's vegetables are grown, ruled by "the King," as Oakes calls iceberg lettuce.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"Romaine lettuce is the hottest thing, because everyone is eating Caesar salad now," Oakes observed from behind the wheel before launching into a discourse on seed pelletization, an industrial process that coats seeds to make them more uniform and easier to plant by machine.
While Oakes' tour is offbeat, even for California, it is a tiny but potentially fertile seed in the flourishing movement of agricultural tourism. In states ranging from Vermont to Wisconsin, farm tourism, including "agri-tainment" like U-Pick-'Em Christmas tree lots and Victorian high teas amid hay bales, is on the rise. Spotted in Brainerd, Minnesota: a beef and pork tasting room).
In California, one of 20 states actively promoting agricultural tourism, direct marketing -- including hay rides, farm stands, income from farmers markets, and bed-and-breakfasts on farms -- now accounts for US$75 million a year, a small but increasingly significant part of the state's US$20 billion agricultural industry, said an agricultural economist.
In Vermont, tourism-related agriculture, including sleigh rides, maple sugar visits and sheep wool spinning, represents US$10 million in income for 3,000 small farms.
The interest in agricultural tourism also represents the convergence of several major cultural trends.
"There is a growing concern about where food comes from," said Kent Gustafson, an extension educator in tourism at the University of Minnesota. "And families with young kids are looking for real, authentic experiences beyond Six Flags."
Oakes "is on to something," said Jolly of the University of California at Davis.
"Agriculture is basically cultivated nature," he said, "and this is part of nature tourism. Just as people love to go to national parks and visit forests, they are fascinated with learning how agriculture -- which is well-managed nature -- works. It's part of a healing process."
While not overtly about healing, Oakes' tour does include a picnic at a winery. En route, he addresses many profound changes in the American landscape, like tallying farm-worker productivity with computers and suburban sprawl. As the van sped past a billboard for a new stucco housing development in Salinas, for example, Oakes confided that "seven years ago we used to do lettuce experiments here."
Sprawl is considered "the most threatening problem we face," said Ken Lewis, the owner of the 800-acre Gabilan View Farms outside Salinas. It is more dangerous than even two-spotted mites in a strawberry field, which can be controlled, he explained to the enthralled group, by releasing reddish-orange predator mites -- 30,000 per hectre.
To Lewis and other farmers, visits by Oakes' van are an opportunity for some public relations. "You hear so much about agriculture raping our resources and polluting our streams," he said. "It's not all like that. In every industry, there are always rogues like Enron. But most of us are true husbanders of the soil."
Farmers learn from tourists, too. After making numerous references to what "the housewife" finds appealing about strawberries, Lewis was confronted by Frances Shaffi, a real estate developer from Monterey. "I'm going to gag," she said, barely able to contain herself. "The correct term is consumers, not housewives."
Oakes, who wears an enamel artichoke pin on his left lapel, specializes in viticulture, or wine grapes. He subsidizes his agricultural tours with trips to more mainstream destinations like Hearst Castle and Salinas Valley wineries. A former assistant farm advisor with the Monterey County Agricultural Center in Salinas, he now consults with the University of California. Five years ago, he realized that preaching to the unconverted might be more satisfying than "standing out in the middle of fields taking soil samples and counting aphid colonies on lettuce plants."
Agricultural tourism, he notes, is much more highly developed in Europe, especially in Italy, where rural tourism is seen as a way of maintaining the heritage of villages and revitalizing their economy.
Whether people will come to share his passion for the life cycle of broccoli is an open question. "People don't know where their food comes from," he said. "Here, they see it."
Meanwhile, the living embodiment of everything you always wanted to know about farm scenery but were afraid to ask rolls on, cartons of strawberries teetering on the dashboard.
"Is that mustard?" asked Shaffi, eyeing a fleeting field of yellow flowers.
"Weeds," Oakes replied.
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