OWYHEE PRODUCE’S BAILEY MYERS REVEALS HOW TO START AN AGRITOURISM OPERATION ON YOUR FARM Sure, sure, sure you can do a farm tour. But how about goat yoga? Festivals? Air BnBs? Bailey Myers, the Director of Marketing at Owyhee Produce in Parma, Idaho, appeared on a recent episode of Western Growers’ Voices of the Valley podcast to discuss how she helps diversify her farm’s revenue stream via agritourism offerings.
This transcript has been edited and condensed from the original podcast for clarity. Scan this QR code to listen to Voices of the Valley - and please subscribe and review!
Ann Donahue, Director of Marketing and Communications at Western Growers : Let’s start out with the basics - what do you guys grow and where are you located? Bailey Myers, Director of Marketing at Owyhee Produce: We are located right on the border of Idaho and Oregon - we have farmland and packing facilities in both states. We grow around 13 different crops ranging from asparagus, watermelon, sweet corn, all the way down to onion, sugar beets and corn. Ann: Tell me a bit about your background in agritourism. Bailey: Agritourism is something that I actually went to school for in Hawaii. I got my degree with an emphasis in agriculture education and hospitality and tourism. I knew from the beginning that that’s where I wanted to focus my attention when I came back to the farm. When we have family who want to come back to work on the farm, we ask them to grow their operation when they come back - bring something new, whether it’s a new way to focus on a crop or a new way to bring revenue in. We’re always working on expanding and challenging our own individuals. I’ve always been someone who loves education. Give me any course or any class and I’ll take it. But I also am really passionate about agriculture. I spent a year traveling Oregon and teaching in different high schools in ag programs. It sparked this interest of how can I educate in a fun way that’s memorable and how can our farm be a part of that? Agritourism is pretty simple. You want to bring people to a farm and create something memorable. Something even as simple as
going to a pumpkin patch, which most people do nowadays, is agritourism. Farm-to-fork dinners? Agritourism. The goat yoga that’s super trendy? Agritourism. The industry has grown a lot, especially since the pandemic in 2020. Society just saw this need of ‘I want to know where my food comes from,’ but you also had to find a space to gather that was out in the open. That’s when we started our farm-to-fork dinners. There’s this whole undercurrent of making sure that experience is as flawless as possible. If it’s a memorable event, whatever they learned from that event is going to be tied with that memory. You want to make sure that they walk away with something that’s beneficial, whether it’s, Oh, I didn’t know that we had bison that was local, or I didn’t know that onions could be cooked in this way. You want them to take away something that’s positive with that memory.
22 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com March | April 2025
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