The economic impact of diversification into agritourism

Abstract

Livestock production often has a crucial role in the overall farm system, especially under unpredictable conditions. In the Czech Republic, cattle farming is stagnating and farmers have to search for additional and alternative sources of income. Diversification strategies often mean that farmers have to find new uses for existing resources (farm buildings, equipment, labor), stepping into the meat processing sector and farm-to-table system or into agritourism. In this paper, we simulate the scenarios representing the potential benefit of diversification into agritourism. The paper adopts the system dynamics approach to model three different sized farms, calibrated with official data. In addition, a management flight simulator is used in an applied case study. In both cases, we evaluate the impact of the agritourism on the economic performance of the farm. In the case study, we also test the scenarios of the impact of coronavirus lockdown. From the long-term perspective, the diversification into agritourism brings the benefit even under the conditions of one season lockdown and improves the economic output of the beef cattle farm more than the farm-to-table strategy.