Caroline Millar, Reflecting on Scotland’s National Agritourism Strategy
Today, I Co-Chaired Scotland’s Agritourism Strategy Board with Cabinet Secretary, Mairi Gougeon.
Scotland’s first national strategy on agritourism was launched almost two years ago and the implementation board first met in December 2022.
This weekend I head back to Tuscany, over 10 years since I first went there for five weeks as part of my Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust study. I will be joined by 24 farmers and two economic development professionals from Scotland, heading out to learn for themselves about the immense scale and success of agritourism in Italy. The rich consumer experience entirely linked to food from the farm. This sector is a mainstay of the rural economy. Italy is known globally for agritourism and a place you choose to go a food holiday on a farm.
We have an extremely vibrant agritourism community and offering in Scotland. It is the Scottish version and there are so many great entrepreneurial farmers and crofters who are behind this movement. But we have a long way to go to realise the economic and social benefits of some other countries.
Today on the way home on the train, I reflected how far we have come since 2008 and the years after that when no one said the word, agritourism. There was no joined up approach. Many public sector agencies didn’t really get it. The private sector was scattered. We didn’t know who was really out there.
The most successful agritourism economies that I see globally have had some legislation or policy intervention which has been a game changer. We are not at that stage yet, but there is no reason why we couldn’t have this in Scotland or the UK.
What we do have, which I can assure you, after the “wilderness years” are two great things. The private sector as a strong network – working together with individual public sector agencies to progress different areas of the national agritourism strategy in between meetings. And meetings like today when the key players who are making this happen are around the same table and in the same room.
So these were the people and agencies around today’s table. The Scottish Government, VisitScotland, Scotland Food & Drink, Scottish Enterprise, South of Scotland Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, all local authorities represented by SLAED (Scotland’s Local Authorities Economic Development Group), and the private sector represented by Scottish Agritourism.
Specifically, today we discussed local authorities and planning and used evidence gathered from 38 case study businesses on planning experiences. We discussed the marketing of the sector; short term lets and the measurement of the sector.
We might not be at the radical game changing agritourism in law policy level yet but we have a firm focus on the targets for growth for the sector. 300 plus new entrants by 2030, £250 million economic value, 1000 farms and crofts in agritourism and farm retail.
Please come along to Scotland’s Agritourism Conference in November and find out more about progress being made for yourself.
https://ScotAgConf23.eventbrite.co.uk