Plan to start a green business, home business, or is your current SOHO a bed and breakfast, country inn, or rural hotel?  You can cash in on the expanding eco-travel and huge local food movement by adding a simple boutique mini farm company to your current green growing businesses or SOHO plan, even on less than an acre.  

home business owners of hotels and bed and breakfasts, as well as innkeepers, can dramatically increase their business profits, word-of-mouth promoting, and attract substantially higher numbers of B and B, country hotel or rural hotel guests by surrounding their agricultural or tiny town accommodation business with a synergizing second cash stream — either a’micro eco-farm,’ or’agritourism,’ or both.  A micro eco-farm is a small cottage or boutique mini-farm that operates for profit with eco-friendly practices.  Agritourism means hosting guests on a real farm for more money for the farm owner.  Most green B and B, country inn or agricultural hotel treatments involve green energy additions and reduced indoor poisons, and these are worthy.  But the next cool green trend emerging is local green food production, along with a renaissance of savory lost heirloom, gourmand, and workman foodie pleasures that are easily grown, but not provided by typical food production. Bed and breakfast half moon bay

Below we’ll describe how to do it simply and successfully.

But first, here are the numerous benefits:

1.  You’ll add a big consumer draw to your B and B, country hotel or rural hotel.  Owners of hotels even in more urban settings can create their own exclusive chef gardens which are becoming hot for 5-star restaurants.  For agricultural hotels, bed and breakfasts, and country inns, the attractiveness of farmstays has grown dramatically.  Purdue university reports that visits to real farms are the fastest growing segment of tourism in the country.  Folks like to see wandering hens that produced the eggs for their breakfast, pet one or two rare wool sheep that provided wool for the throws on their beds, or tour a blueberry patch and organic market garden.  

2.  You can add revenue by producing farm-grown non-perishable products to sell retail to your visitors.  Farm grown and made strawberry jam, world-cuisine salsas, hand-woven Shetland sheep ( rare miniature sheep that produce luxurious wool ) scarfs, herbal candles, hand-crafted goat-milk soap.  Even a little town B and B with an herb garden can make sachets.  This stuff can be sold year-long online also.  Guests love to take home something tangible from their stay, and like to be reminded of their stay by continuing to get items for themselves and as gifts online after they return home.  

3.  You can further draw new customers by offering agritourism activities, when you own a genuine farm.  Allow guests to tour your flower garden or collect their own eggs and pick their own blueberries, view the ducks or pet the goats.  

four.  You can generate even more sources of cash while simultaneously getting more word-of-mouth promoting with agritourism activities that you offer for an additional fee.  Offer them not only to bed and breakfast, country hotel or rural hotel guests, but also to day visitors, or both, allowing yourself to generate profits from much more than just overnite clients.  For example, supply a regular cooking class using the farm’s ingredients that both overnite or day guests can pay to attend, a gardening workshop in spring where you can also sell garden starts to the area community, or give tours of the farm to college youngsters for $5 a head during weekdays when you have less overnite clients.  Two tours in a day with fifty youngsters each not only brings an additional $500 for the day, but children and adult chaperones will begin generating valuable word of mouth promoting about your bed-and-breakfast, country hotel or rustic hotel.  

5.  You can cut costs on flowers and food.  The flowers and food items you grow yourself will look and taste superb, have the shopper appeal of being locally grown, and cut your bills.  Further, you can grow those exotic African jelly melons or miniature Mexican cucumbers that no other bed and breakfast, country hotel or rural hotel offers.  

six.  You can stay ahead of other farmers due to your B and B, country hotel or rural hotel.  The gigantic issue for many farmers isn’t just growing the crops or raising the animals.  It’s knowing there are enough customers waiting to buy the product.  With your farm’s crops serving your own bed and breakfast, country inn or rustic hotel and its retail shop and agritourism activities, you have your own self-made market.