Growing up in rural Parke County, Ind., it never occurred to me there were people in the world who had never seen a field of crops. It also never occurred to me that people would even be interested in just getting out of their vehicles to watch corn being harvested.

As a self-centered child in the 1970s I assumed everyone could walk down a country road and never pass another car for hours, or hike in the woods whenever they wanted.

I remember my dad coming in for supper one night talking about a group of people who stopped at the edge of the road and got out to take photos of him harvesting corn, and he saw them all walk into the edge of the field and just take an ear of corn. This was during the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival, which in its heyday brought 500,000 people or more into the county in a 10-day period. Many of those people were from Chicago, and they were fascinated by all things agricultural.

Of course, I never heard the term “agritourism” when I was a kid, although certainly growing up in Parke County, I understood tourism well. This tiny county turned 30-plus covered bridges into a national attraction and boosted the economy tremendously.

I remember walking around the town square during the festival and seeing people buying bunches of foxtail (often spray-painted bright colors) or hedge apples for 25 cents each. This always amazed me. Hedge apples – fruit of the Osage orange tree – were everywhere and you could just drive down almost any county road and pick them up for free.

People sold them, purporting they had insect-repelling properties. Toxicologists from the University of Iowa extracted compounds from hedge apples. When concentrated, these compounds were found to repel insects. However, the scientists also found that natural concentrations of these compounds in the fruit were too low to be an effective repellent.

Now agritourism is a buzzword often bandied about as a way to bring in money in nontraditional ways. My brothers and I briefly toyed with some ideas such as setting up dirt bike trails or primitive camping in our woods, but with major cities more than an hour away and the liability involved, we never went past a few meetings about it.

One of my aunts had groups of people who were into the sport of mounted shooting use her land for a while. Mounted shooting is kind of like an Old West show, with trick shooting and horseback riding.

We do lease our wooded land for hunting, and I always have people asking me if they can lease it if our current hunter ever decides not to renew the lease. We have some amazing woods with a beautiful large creek flowing through and some hills just steep enough to make you feel it, but not so tall as to make you not want to go up one.

Of course farm markets are popular forms of agritourism. It seems everyone likes to visit a farm and pick an apple or choose a pumpkin.

I occasionally dream of retiring and cutting some better trails through our woods and hosting children’s groups out so they can learn to love the land and see that what they do matters. I worked as a naturalist assistant one summer at Turkey Run State Park, and one of the favorite talks I did was called the “Web of Life,” where we showed people how everything is connected.

Of course I would still need to be able to walk the land to do this and, with the arthritis in my knee and hip, I sometimes wonder if I have already waited too long for that dream.

For some other thoughts about how agritourism might affect people in different ways, read the story by Celeste Baumgartner on page 1B, on a debate at the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation’s 100th meeting, in which not everyone agreed on what agritourism might mean.

Do you use your land for any kind of tourism event? If so, what do you do and how does it work for you? If we all share ideas, then the world will be a better place and we can learn from each other. Send me an email at connie@farmworldonline.com and I hope to get enough good ideas to share in a future column.