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If you ask children who have grown up in an urban or suburban environment, at least some of them will probably answer, “The store.”
There was a time when even the smallest patch of a backyard would host a garden and, come harvest season, neighbors would swap tomatoes for zucchini, squash, and carrots. Not so much anymore. There are still neighborhoods that were once avocado and mango groves where a handful of those trees have surgvived and still flourish, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
Miami-Dade County is still home to a large belt of farms and groves in the south part of the County. And Miami-Dade Commissioner Kionne McGhee is trying to help those farms not just merely survive, but to thrive.
There is an intersection where commerce meets education and AgriTourism sits at the center of it. I’m not talking about “The Land” Pavillion at Disney’s EPCOT where animatronic fruits and vegetables sing, dance, and drop guests off at the gift shop.
The University of Florida’s IFAS Institute estimates that Miami-Dade County had about 90,000 acres allocated to agriculture, distributed among 2,244 growers. Of the total farms, 63% were less than 10 acres and 89% were less than 50 acres. In 2002, the market value of agricultural products sold in Miami-Dade County was about $578 million.
Not all that money is profit. And farming is cyclical. A bumper crop can be followed by years that are a bust.
AgriTourism is introducing real people to the real going-on of raising our food. And there is a great interest in it. A recent report by Fortune Business Insight pegs the current global market for AgriTourism at $69.24 billion, with the expectation that it will exceed $117 billion by the end of the decade.
Commissioner McGhee has proposed an ordinance aimed at giving farmers leeway as they tap into this global market. Agricultural users – farmers – would have the ability to establish wineries, distilleries, fruit and vegetable markets on their properties without having to seek a rezoning of the property for these ancillary uses. Likewise, buildings that house areas containing agricultural exhibits would now be permitted, as well.
Farming is a tough business. Everything rides on the success or failure of the current crop, be it fruits, vegetables, nuts, and even fish grown in aquaculture ponds.
Allowing farmers to host tourists who would pay for the pleasure of seeing how food is grown, how fruiits are turned into wine or distilled into alcoholic beverages, how we all are connected to the good earth, will allow them to hedge the nnual bet they make on their crops.
Just as importantly, it might allow some of them to resist the temptation to sell their land for the expansion of our urban frontier.
We applaud Commissioner Kionne McGhee’s efforts.
