Author(s)

Y. Ohe

Abstract

Educational activities provided by farmers have recently been gaining attention and enabling consumers to learn about food, life and rural heritage. This paper reports the attitudes of the next-generation successors of Educational Dairy Farms (EDF) who are now working on-farm, in comparison with their counterparts working on ordinary dairy farms in Japan, as determined by questionnaire surveys. First, the main findings were that the EDF successors tended to have wider job experience, and longer and more varied training experience across the country and/or abroad than their counterparts in ordinary dairy farms. This means that EDF successors have both a wider perspective and more extensive human networks from social learning opportunities. Second, EDF successors gained high psychological rewards and strengthened their identity as a dairy farmer from the educational activity of the farm, including more self-confidence and pride as a dairy farmer. Third, most successors, however, did not consider the educational service to be economically viable. Thus, in the long term, it will be necessary to levy a service charge to make the educational activity viable. Quality improvement was considered to be a necessary measure for this purpose.

Keywords

educational tourism, rural tourism, dairy farm, farm tourism, agritourism.