Agritourism continues to grow in popularity, with over 70 million people visiting farms each year – and almost 24 million of these visitors are children. While some visitors are buying fresh produce, others are learning about where their food comes from. Still others visit agritourism operations to have fun: enjoying a hayride, walking through a corn maze or choosing the perfect pumpkin to carve or decorate.
Whatever the reason for the visit, it is up to the farmers who invite visitors onto their farms to ensure the safety and health of their visitors. Implementing appropriate safety strategies can help reduce visitor injuries and illnesses, potentially reducing liability.
An amazing website, https://safeagritourism.org/, provides a wide-selection of free tools and resources farmers need to help keep their visitors safe. The site provides interactive walkthroughs, easy-to-use checklists, and other applicable resources to seamlessly integrate safety into your agritourism business. Using the website is easy and fun. Another huge advantage to using the site is that permission is granted to brand any of the materials with your farm or ranch logo.
Once you access the website, determine the topics pertinent to your farm, then follow these steps and use the “Topic Checklist” to track your progress.
Review the walkthrough (or informational pages) on your topics to learn about safety best practices/guidelines and how to identify safety hazards.
When you reach the end of the walkthrough, print the checklist. While walking through your farm, fill out the checklist, which will help you identify and document which safety strategies you have in place, and which you need to implement.
Visit the resource page, where you will find signs, policies, logs or other resources to help you address the safety issues you identified with the checklist. Use these free resources to address the safety issues, enter the date “fixed” on the checklist and keep for documentation purposes.
