Combining Agriculture and Tourism: Ways to Promote the Interconnections Between Environment, Development and Sustainability

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), as one of the most prominent European Union policies, has increased concerns about the environmental sustainability of farms, particularly since its major reform in 1992. The changes implemented since this reform have intended to promote more integrated rural development, with deeper interrelationships between the agricultural sector and other rural activities, including agritourism, from the perspective of diversification of the activities that can be developed on farms and in rural areas. The idea of this strategy is to bring more income for farmers by changing the policy measures and enhancing a more sustainable agricultural and rural development. Nonetheless, the interrelationships between the diversification of activities in the agricultural sector and the characteristics of the farms have not yet been fully explored. In this context, this research aims to bring more insight into how agritourism revenues can be predicted by the farm characteristics in the European Union (UE) agricultural regions, considering data from FADN (Farm Accountancy Data Network), for 2023, using machine learning algorithms (following IBM SPSS Modeler Version 18.4 procedures). The results obtained show that agritourism output is higher in EU countries with larger farms (Slovakia and Czechia) and that are more economically dynamic (Netherlands and Denmark). Slovenia, Austria, Italy, and Finland are countries in which farms have a higher part of agritourism revenues in the total output. There is space to better explore agritourism potentialities and to improve the availability of data. When the total crop output increases by 1%, agritourism revenue grows by 0.719%.