If your community or region is looking to develop food and farm tourism, you're in good company. Destinations around the world are using food tourism development as a strategy to meet visitors' desire for immersive travel experiences and to strengthen local economies at the same time.

Rural communities are uniquely positioned to capitalize on food tourism trends. Many retain—or can rebuild—a close connection to agriculture and tradition that gives them strong platform of local products, existing and potential food tourism assets, and cultural connections that can be woven together. Food tourism can both highlight and protect landscapes, cultures and communities for a truly sustainable approach to tourism development. Food tourists care about the places they visit, and often report spending more on food and drink — typically the largest category of visitor spending — than other travelers, making them just the kind of visitors you want to invite to your community. And food tourism is flexible. It works as a standalone strategy, or it can be used to enhance other tourism experiences.

Whether your community — or, better, your region — is just getting started or looking to take food and agritourism to the next level, assessing your local food tourism assets and opportunities can provide a solid base of information, ideas and a roadmap for moving ahead. In this course, you will learn and adapt proven approaches that engage community resources without hiring a marketing consultant, economist or business development specialist.

In this course, you will:

• Adapt Harbinger's "engaged analysis" approach to develop an assessment process that matches your community's resources.

• Identify goals and match up data sources, assessment methods and resources for conducting your assessment.

• Learn proven, hands-on assessment tools for understanding your local food tourism landscape, visitor experience and desires, and how well your branding and marketing match your unique food tourism selling points.

• Identify how and what to learn from other food tourism destinations.

• Learn how to do your own market/trade area analysis and evaluate business opportunities in the food tourism sector.

• Learn how to help local businesses and entrepreneurs assess opportunities for business growth, expansion and startups in food tourism.

• Receive resources and templates you can use to get a head start on your assessment.

Good Words from Course Participants

Thanks so much for the excellent course, I really feel like it helped us work through figuring out what information we were actually trying to gather with this survey, and what survey answers could be used singly or in combination with other answers to give us that information.

Hanne Beener, Chelan-Douglas Land Trust

Working with Michele was a pleasure. She and Harbinger were more than flexible, and went out of their way to do everything possible to make the Economic Benefit course financially feasible for our network members. On top of that, Michele worked with us ahead of time to ensure that the course included information and examples that were relevant to our state.

We started a weekly post-course discussion group (highly recommended), which allowed participants to share ideas and compare notes. As a result, we’ve been working on plans, both at our individual organizations and collectively, for putting what we learning into action. Michele has been supporting our efforts with follow up coaching.

Donna Bissett, Maine Coast Heritage Trust