Small farms across America tend to their latest crop: tourists.
When was the last time you heard much about small farms in America? Back in 1985 when Willie Nelson launched Farm Aid?

The small-farm life hasn't gotten any easier since the days when Willie first started collecting cash for the country's cropkeepers. "Over the last 10 to 15 years, we've seen large agribusiness operations [farms with at least $1 million in annual revenues] begin to take over commodity production," says Desmond Jolly, an agricultural economist at University of California, Davis, and director of UC's Small Farm Center. "Small farms have to find ways to create niches like specialty crops, products, and selling directly to consumers."

For many farmers, that niche is agricultural tourism, known simply as agritourism. An umbrella term that encompasses everything from roadside produce stands to U-pick farms to on-site bed-and-breakfast operations, agritourism has helped more than a few farmers keep their businesses - many of them generations old - from being plowed under. But it offers a great deal more than family fun and new life for some old farms; it also helps people reconnect to history and the source of all that food they buy at their local megamarket. (Yes, Virginia, milk does come from cows. Believe it or not, more than a few farmers can tell tales of kids who were flat-out flummoxed by that fact.)

And the one crop that farmers never charge for is their stories.

A Peach of an Idea
Larry King was in their cornfield. So was Oprah Winfrey. And this summer? Jay Leno is expected to pop up and stay until late October. No, celebrities aren't turning up to help harvest the Schnepf Farms crops; their likenesses were cut into the cornfields, for Mark and Carrie Schnepf's notion of a great maze.