to recognise non-financial benefits from farming and so be satisfied
with a lower level of income, but cannot find similar satisfaction
from income derived from tourism.
Participants were often very vocal about how they viewed their
farm attraction and felt a responsibility to allow tourists to enjoy
what they regarded as an ‘authentic’ farm experience. Some
attractions were highly integrated into normal farming activities
while others were kept separate from the farm, and often run by
different members of the family, allowing less interaction between
the tourist and the farm environment, reflecting MacCannell’s
(1976) ‘front’ and ‘back’ locations. Thus as an example of the
latter, a farmer and son who had been in partnership as farmers
divided the partnership up when they diversified with the father
setting up and managing the tourism attraction business while the
son kept going with the farm. The following interview excerpts are
from those embracing the former approach whereby there was
a desire to integrate everyday farm activities into experiencing the
attraction in order to provide what they deemed to be an ‘authentic
experience’. These illustrate the still dominant identity of these
owners as farm families:
‘. we are still a working farm, and hopefully that’s what keeps
attracting them’.
‘We’ve tried to keep ours as much a farm. It’s not a farm park, it’s
not a museum . it’s a working farm. But we are now being
pushed into the play areas and the pedal trucks’.
The projected definition of the business was found not to be
dependant upon the level of income generated by a particular
activity, be it tourism or farming, or the time devoted to that
endeavour, or even recognition of the future direction of the
countryside. Instead, it was found to depend upon those highly
emotive and intangible elements associated with running a farm,
and a resentment of what were seen to be the lower status and less
important pursuits involved in a tourism enterprise. Tourism as an
industry was afforded less legitimacy by the farmers, particularly
those who had only recently sought a diversification strategy. Itwas
perceived as having an indirect purpose in the countryside when
compared to what were regarded as more directly relevant agricultural
activities. Tourism enterprise was regarded by some as
a means to an end and therefore more transient in nature in terms
of its inherent value to the countryside. This view is reflected in the
following interview excerpts which demonstrate the reluctance of
some participants about their move into tourism, a strategy that
would involve a fundamental and highly personal renegotiation of
their definition of self (Burton, 2004) and how they characterise
and project their role;
‘I’m a farmer, a simple farmer, you can imagine, and we were
a small farm, only 50 ha, and it was fairly obvious we had to do
something, so we decided to open to the public and we did our
homework as best we could’.
‘I should maybe have said, look, I’m not a farmer anymore. I’m
going to be an attraction land. You see. Flamingo Land started
as a farm and when they started, it was a pig house and
a chicken house, and now of course it’s come along. We had
never any intention of going down that way.’
Some older family members recounted feelings of nostalgia for
the days when they were purely a working farm and did not
operate as a farm attraction for the public. Some preferred working
on traditional farming chores rather than dealing with visitors who
might interfere with or restrict agricultural activity. Reasons for this
included legal concerns and health and safety, as well as the view
that more rigid separationwould be operationally superior in terms
of efficiency. However, the boundaries between the working farm
and the farm attraction are essentially difficult to demarcate due to
their physical interdependence (Busby & Rendle, 2000). Despite
this, there was a view expressed for physical boundaries to be
preserved in order to maintain a distinction between ‘front’ and
‘back’ locations. This is demonstrated by the following description
which shows boundaries set up between both functions. Whilst
this may not always involve a physical separation due to practical
restrictions, the coping mechanisms adopted to separate the two
domains involved strategies such as creating greater temporal
distance in order to restrict overlapping boundaries;
‘They fit in fairly well because we’re milking at seven in the
morning and we go through all the feeding and milking by.
half past nine and then we’re ready for opening at half past ten.
We don’t milk until half past five, and we shut at five, so the two
fit together fairly well’.
There were frequent examples of farm families who sought to
project a farming identity but who relied on the income from
tourism, and so said that they were forced to co-locate farming and
tourism on the same site. Consequently they said that they often
struggled with accommodating the two industries together. The
following excerpts illustrate the perceived clash in attempting to
combine both domains, with some farming activities being seen as
undesirable from a tourism perspective. Similarly, the need to tend
to tourists was often viewed as impeding ‘proper farming’ activity;
‘Steve built an ice-cream parlour. he’s the best cowman in the
county e he’s superb. But he built an ice-cream parlour in the
middle of the farmyard. The silo smells, there’s muck-spreading
smells. Who’d want it? I’m sorry but who’d want it?’
‘You can’t farm and have an open farm . No way, not proper
farming’.
‘To be frank with you, tourism and the farming side don’t mix.
You cannot be working at something on a farm and take a few
minutes out to deal with the public. Your focus when you’re
dealing with the public has got to be public, not farming’.
Hence, as an alternative to a more explicit ‘switch’, these individuals
are more likely to attempt to ‘modify’ temporarily their
farming activities through the diversification route in order to
accommodate both farming and tourism activities together. This is
exemplified by the following excerpt;
‘Our main income now is from the diversification, but the farm
side is so important because that’s what attracts them here.
the farm, the conservation, the tourism, it’s a triangle that works
quite well together’.
‘A lot of them now, it’s either a tourism business or it’s a farming
business, and we don’t want to do that if we can’.
4.2. A model of experiential authenticity: family identities and
farm-tourism attractions
The dilemma for farm family members seeking to retain and
project a desired identity, whether based on farming or tourism
entrepreneurship, is to combine both farming and tourism and to
manage any inherent conflict between the two industries. Fig. 1
presents a model of experiential authenticity for farm family
members in terms of their definitions of their family farms and
tourism enterprises and their own identities.
The label of ‘modifier’ is apportioned by the authors to those
farm families describing the need to diversify but essentially
wishing to remain in farming as their primary self-categorization
(Turner et al., 1987). Modifiers recognise the need to diversify their
business model temporarily, but define themselves strongly as