Participant with Alberta Open Farm Days
Chatsworth Farm, located in Vermilion, Alberta, raises beef cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese and also grows cereal and legume crops.
Chatsworth Farm has participated in Alberta Open Farm Days for four years. Here’s what they have to say about the experience.
What were your motives behind participating in Open Farm Days?
In 2020 (during Covid) we started doing virtual farm tours on Facebook live – mostly for our extended family to watch. However, many other people started watching them too and became interested in visiting the farm in-person. This is when we started considering getting involved with OFDs because we already had an interested audience. We initially started participating in the event to provide educational tours to help people learn about farming. Over the years there have been many other bonus benefits including driving sales of our products, providing enjoyment and bringing the community together.
We are always trying to think of experiences that will be easily resettable, and that work well with large groups.
What types of experiences could visitors enjoy on site at your farm?
Our first year participating was very simple – it had to be due to covid restrictions. We started with offering basic educational tours and selling some of our products. However, every year since, we have continued to scale up. Over the years, we have offered guided farm tours, a pop-up shop, garden tours, onsite farmers market with multiple vendors, interactive activities like: machinery demonstrations, a seed planting station, calf pulling and wheat grinding demonstrations. Guests can also enjoy live music, a barbecue using our own products, and several kids activities including a bouncy combine, sandbox and chick petting zoo.
Past visitors have told us that they want to have firsthand experience of what farmers do – such as washing eggs or cleaning a chicken house etc. However, not all of these things are possible experiences for the public due to safety. To meet this desire, we added calving demonstrations to highlight something unique that farmers do that most people would never get the opportunity to experience. However, we are always trying to think of experiences that will be easily resettable, and that work well with large groups.
Every year we like to expand and add new pieces to keep things exciting. We want to give people the opportunity to have a full day experience on our farm.
What advice would you give to other farms considering participating in Open Farm Days?
We would highly recommend utilizing some form of registration process so that you can know how many people to expect, but also to gain demographic data. This data is extremely useful when trying to gain sponsorship opportunities. When you approach a business seeking sponsorship for your event you will be able to show them statistics on the types of audiences they will be reaching, thus showing them a solid return on their investment. This information is also valuable to you as you plan future events because it will help to determine the target audiences for your programming (is it primarily city dwellers or members of your local community?)
It is also important that you create an emergency plan so that you feel well equipped in case something does happen. This includes knowing how far away an ambulance or hospital is and having a template for an incident response form in place so that you can provide the ambulance with it. We also have registrants sign an online waiver at the time of registrations to ensure that they are aware that this is an operating farm and there are associated risks. Having these things in place will protect you as a business owner.Â
Properly planning out all of the relevant logistics for the day of the event is essential for it to run smoothly. Consider parking, site accessibility, washrooms, and volunteers or workers. We recommend that you start early with your planning to make sure everything if covered.
Connect with local organizations or other farms in your area to share ideas and the work load. There are so many opportunities for collaboration!
Lastly, Open Farm Days does a lot for promoting the event as a whole, I highly recommend that you also promote your business/event through social media or reaching out to your local media for coverage – they love a community focused event!
What were the positive outcomes that resulted from participating in Open Farm Days?
Positive feedback from the event, increase in sales for the farm and for the participating vendors, amount of community engagement and positive media.
Free event for guest to attend – farms don’t make money on this offered event, but this is a big sell for the media because the event is free and promoting community. It is trendy, important and unique.
What do you believe is the value of agri-tourism? Who does it help and why does it matter?
Agri-tourism can be a huge revenue opportunity for farms – however you need to be willing to do the creative work. If you are, it has the potential to increase both your brand awareness and sales (Last year we sold $2600 of product at our OFD event!).
From an economic standpoint, OFDs also increased tourism in the entire Vermillion area because attendees stayed in local airbnbs and went to visit other local businesses like breweries and restaurants.
If individual farms are interested in branching into agri-tourism, then participating in OFDs is the perfect platform to start because they have built-in help with promotion.
People are craving the opportunity to visit farms. They want to understand the story behind how the food is produced so they can build an emotional connection to it. Your offering doesn’t need to be fancy and frilly – you can simply offer an experience unique to your farm that others can learn from and feel connected to.
Discover more about this farm at chatsworthfarm.ca
