Michelle Infante-Casella: My name is Michelle Infante-Casella, I’m an agricultural agent
and associate professor with Rutgers cooperative extension, and our department is the agriculture
and resource management agents department.
Agricultural agents are part of the land grant system at universities around the country.
EVery state has a land grant university and what we do is primarily work with horticultural
crops, livestock, and anything really that has to do with nature or agriculture.
The name of the research project we’re working on is agritourism risk management and safety
checks, so what we do is we work with farmers, go out and look at their farms and it’s
a fresh set of eyes talking about what they can do to make their farms safer, what they
can do to be in compliance with government regulations, and overall just help make better
customer experience for marketing their products and their services on the farms.
About 4 years ago we brought a group of extension professionals from Rutgers together that were
all working on agritourism issues and direct marketing issues.
We each felt that we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas so we all brought our talents
together to start an overall agritourism and direct marketing project, so an on farm activity
is where the public comes on the farm and they’re doing something for enjoyment.
They’re not necessarily just coming there to buy produce or to buy a product from the
farmer they’re actually doing activities such as going out and pick your own or doing
a hay ride, some kind of amusement.
Everyone loves to come to a farm for a hayride, maybe it’s just for an amusement or maybe
they’re taking the public out to the field to pick something.
Making sure the tractors are safe, the wagons are safe, there’s ample training of the
people utilizing that equipment on your farm, and then also having someone on the wagons
with the riders so they’re not standing up or throwing things or hitting their heads
on branches as they’re passing by, all of these things are just extra eyes that we look
at and things that we talk to the farmer about making it safer.
We have meetings and educational programs where we bring farmers together to discuss
their tactics and that is really, I think the biggest things that have come out of this
project.
Farmers learning from farmers, extension learning from farmer and extension giving back to teaching
many farmers through this project so it really goes hand in hand.
When we try to get farms enrolled into our safety and risk management assessment program,
sometimes they’re apprehensive because they don’t necessarily want to know that they’re
doing something wrong or they don’t want you to know that they’re doing something
wrong on the farm and that’s a misconception of what we do in extension.
We’re not regulators, we’re not there to come down on someone for doing something
incorrectly.
We’re there to educate and help improve the system.
Whether it be crop growing, whether it be something like this where we’re talking
about regulations or safety, and everyone that has been enrolled in our project is confidential.
We don’t go out and share that this farm has done this and we’ve seen this and they’re
doing this wrong.
One thing with agritourism, even though a lot of farmers are getting into it now it’s
not necessarily a competitive business if you have another farmer down the road that
has an agritourism venture.
Especially if they’re a little bit different than yours, so for instance this works well
with the wineries in New Jersey where they became destination areas, so families may
want to come out of the cities for the weekend and they may want to go visit a farm but if
they go to an area that there’s 3, 4, 5, maybe 6 farms, people will go visit many of
those farms are go back to that area the next year and visit others that they had missed.
So it’s not necessarily bad to have more than one agritourism venture or winery or
pick your own pumpkin area in a town or a municipality because it becomes now a destination
for people to hit up, so this particular project is funded by the USDA, sustainable agriculture
research education program, as a professional development grant.
With the grant we are poised to do 6 farms per year and we are also supposed to train
about 3 to 5 personnel per farm when we go to those farms so we’re sharing our experiences
and actually training more people to assist agritourism business in the state.
The scope of the project right now, it’s a New Jersey state grant so it’s a New Jersey
project for New Jersey farms, however we will take the information gained, we’ll publish
it and we will present it at national meetings so that other extension professionals around
the country can learn about what we’ve done and maybe can replicate it.
Rutgers cooperative extension is part of the New Jersey agriculture experiment station
and there’s cooperative extension throughout the whole country.
What that was meant to do was to take information from the land grant universities and bring
it out to the public and teach the public.
The one thing that in the last decade or so that extension person was asked to do was
come on to campuses.
Our extension director, Dr. Larry Katz has really urged us to bring some of our knowledge
and experiences to the classroom.
So in 2013, our agritourism working group began a class called direct marketing and
agritourism and we have students in the fall, it’s every other fall semester.
We teach them about regulations, safety, hospitality, all the things that we kind of do when we
do our analysis on the farms.
It’s a 14 week course.
The really interesting thing about it is we have farm family children in the class and
they go back and bring this knowledge back to their farm but then we also have people
who want to work as professionals with agriculture and they learn all about the aspects of what
it takes to do agritourism and direct marketing.
We don’t just want to do this in New Jersey, we want to share our work and our experiences
with other extension professionals around the country.
In fact we actually had international request for our materials.
One was from Antigua and we all volunteered to go to Antigua and help train but it’s
pretty neat when other people around the country and around the world actually look at your
training materials used for their own businesses.