Evaluating Operators' Attitudes to Educational Tourism in Dairy Farms: The Case of Japan

Abstract

Although the educational function is attracting growing attention as a kind of multifunctionality in agriculture, educational services are not yet provided as a viable farm product. With regard to establishing a viable market for this service, this paper explores how the educational externality could be internalized by focusing on educational dairy farms in Japan. The author evaluates quantitatively the attitudes of operators towards establishing a viable service, as revealed by a questionnaire survey. First, a conceptual framework was devised to express their orientation towards an economically viable service by incorporating a stepwise internalization process of positive externalities with the help of a social learning network. Then, empirically, statistical tests were conducted and factors that determined this orientation, a viable service determinant function, were explored by means of the ordered logit model. The results show that, first, the higher the number of visitors to the farm the more operators are oriented towards a viable service, while no connection with ordinary dairy production is demonstrated. Second, social learning is effective for initiating the internalization process. Third, marketing skills become more important for upgrading the internalization level. Consequently, it is important to create opportunities for those farmers who want to provide consumers with educational services to learn a new role for agriculture and to establish a new income source.

Environmental Literacy on Ecotourism: A Study on Student Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavioral Intentions in China and Taiwan

“…(2) Educational tourism: This is focused on providing education to enhance people's environmental knowledge, inducing people to develop favorable attitudes toward the environment, and making them take environmental actions to reduce the impact of tourism [32,33]. (3) Participating tourism: This type of tourism focuses on participation, which allows tourists to give something back to the local economy, improves the well-being of local residents, and encourages all stakeholders to join in brainstorming [7,25,29].…”

Assessing Managerial Efficiency of Educational Tourism in Agriculture: Case of Dairy Farms in Japan

“…Educational tourism in agriculture has not been extensively addressed except for reports by Ohe [9,74,75]. These studies dealt with dairy farms' diversification toward EDFs from the perspective of internalization of the educational externality, but were not directly focussed on the identity of farmers.…”

“…In keeping the pluses and minuses in mind, the author has selected the objective method because it is more operational from a policy perspective. Specifically, based on previous studies of EDFs (Ohe [9,14,74]), whether a farmer levies a service charge is an easily observable objective criterion to indicate a farmer's identity. Thus, we can use the behaviour of levying a charge in an empirical evaluation.…”

“…Here, to simplify the discussion based on previous studies by the author (Ohe [9,14,74,75]), two contrasting types of identity were pointed out that a farmer participating in the EDF program could have: traditional identity and enlarged identity (Ohe [14]). The author further developed this classification here.…”

Farm-based Education: A Comparative Study of Romania and Ukraine

“…As shown by studies in the field, there is an increasing demand for this type of educational services [21], as well as a high availability of the farmers to turn their vegetal or animal farms into educational farms [24], [1].…”