The owner of a five-star farm-based accommodation business firmly believes that the profits from diversification activities will soon overtake those from core farming businesses.
Caroline Millar made the remark as she addressed the Oxford Farming Conference about the Hideaway Experience she runs with her farmer husband Ross at Auchterhouse, near Dundee.
The three luxury cottages, marketed as the lovers’, honeymooners and romantics’ hideaways, sit alongside a 650-acre farming operation which takes in a cereal farm at Balkello and a hill unit at North Balluderon, where there are 80 suckler cows and 200 ewes.
Mrs Millar said: “Our tourism business has used less than 0.6 acres of land, but is generating comparable turnover levels to the farming enterprise, more profit, and has had no impact on the output of the farming enterprise.
“Our small business plays a big part in the local economy with thousands of pounds spent by five-star guests on local farm produce, transport, activities and restaurants. It is this interest in what diversified businesses can achieve for rural development which was behind my wish to undertake a Nuffield Farming Scholarship, which I have recently completed.”
Her forecast is that profits from farm diversification will exceed those from core agricultural production in most parts of the UK over the next 10 years.
Mrs Miller said agritourism in other parts of the world played an important role in farm incomes – and it had the potential to do the same in the UK.
She said all her visitors left with some knowledge of where their food comes from, how it is grown and how farmers care for the environment.
She expects Cap reforms, high land prices, the limited availability of land to expand, the need to accommodate future generations within farming businesses, poor returns on capital and a variety of other issues to conspire to force all farmers to look at getting more out of their existing assets.
Diversification was already an essential element to farming businesses as she had found during her Nuffield studies which took her to Tuscany, which leads the world in agritourism, and Tasmania.
She expects Britain’s farmers to benefit from that boom over the next five years as farm tourism becomes mainstream and more consumers look to farm-based experiences to deliver them new food and drink experiences, a chance to learn more about where their food comes from and new leisure pursuits.
Her own diversification generated cash year-round, which farm outputs did not.
The developed agritourism sector in Italy generates 200,000 bed nights, worth £1billion a year, to 20,000 farmers. Of those providing accommodation, 70% also retail farm produce.
Mrs Millar said UK farmers could benefit from that too.
“I don’t believe that we are anywhere near the stage of having a developed, high quality, agritourism consumer product in the UK. I fundamentally believe that UK agriculture and UK tourism are not good enough,” she added.
The recent formation of Go Rural by her and other like-minded operators would develop the sector and put in place quality standards.