Publications
A collection of all publications authored or co-authored by Center staff and/or partners. This collection is a work in progress—if you don’t find a publication you’re looking for, please search for it, or email us at nercrd@psu.edu.
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The International Workshop on Agritourism (IWA) 2022 Conference Proceedings is intended to increase access to the scholarship that was shared during the three-day conference, which was hosted by University of Vermont Extension in Burlington, Vermont, USA, on August 30 – September 1, 2022. It contains 27 peer-reviewed papers. NERCRD staff provided editorial, project management, and graphic design support to this effort.
Authors: Edited by Lisa Chase, Chadley Hollas, Xinyi Qian, and Claire Whitehouse
Publication: Published jointly by the National Extension Tourism Network and the Global Agritourism Network, with support from the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development Date Published: July 13, 2023
Tags: agritourism, NET, proceedings
Published in 2023, these fact sheets provide comprehensive insights into the demographics of U.S. farms that offer agritourism activities or sell food directly to consumers or both. The fact sheets are available for all 50 states and are intended to help local decision makers, farmers, and the organizations that support them in their efforts to strengthen and expand agritourism enterprises.
Authors: Claudia Schmidt, Kacey Lo, Lisa Chase, Chadley Hollas, Jason Entsminger, Stacy Tomas, Stephan Goetz, Sarah Cornelisse
Date Published: June 2, 2023
Tags: agritourism
Agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales are increasingly used as diversification strategies to generate additional farm revenue streams. Yet despite their growing importance, the impacts, interactions, and adoption of these strategies remain poorly understood. Here we use univariate and bivariate local Moran’s I statistics to identify agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales hotspots in the United States and a Seemingly-Unrelated-Regression Spatial Durbin Model to examine the association between agritourism and direct farm sales to consumers. We find that agritourism and direct sales reinforce each other within the same county but not consistently across neighboring counties.
Authors: Claudia Schmidt, Zheng Tian, Lisa Chase, Chadley Hollas and Stephan J. Goetz
Publication: Agricultural and Resource Economics Review Date Published: April 17, 2023
Recognizing signs of psychological distress is a critical first step in assisting people who are struggling with poor mental health to access help. However, community-level factors that impact recognition and stigma are underexplored. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between rurality, other community-level variables, and individual variables with regard to the recognition and stigma of anxiety.
Authors: Scott Loveridge, Mark Skidmore, Robert Shupp, Paula K. Miller, Courtney Cuthbertson, Stephan J. Goetz
Publication: The Journal of Rural Health Date Published: March 29, 2023
Tags: mental health
This 57-page publication is available here as a Flipping Book. It contains eight case studies that explore innovative Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant work in sustainable tourism and outdoor recreation. It features work being done in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia.
The magazine is an outcome of a partnership of the National Extension Tourism (NET) design team, the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD), and the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) grant program.
Authors: Heather Martin, Rose Hayden-Smith, and Kristen Devlin
Publication: Published by the Extension Foundation Date Published: January 22, 2023
Tags: NET, NTAE
Self-reported innovation measures provide an alternative means for examining the economic performance of firms or regions. While European researchers have been exploiting the data from the Community Innovation Survey for over two decades, uptake of U.S. innovation data has been much slower. This paper uses a restricted innovation survey designed to differentiate incremental innovators from more far-ranging innovators and compares it to responses in the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE) and the Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) to examine the informational value of these positive innovation measures. The analysis begins by examining the association between the incremental innovation measure in the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS) and a measure of the inter-industry buying and selling complexity. A parallel analysis using BRDIS and ASE reveals such an association may vary among surveys, providing additional insight on the informational value of various innovation profiles available in self-reported innovation surveys.
Authors: Zheng Tian, Timothy R. Wojan, Stephan J. Goetz
Publication: U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper Number CES-22-46 Date Published: October 1, 2022
Tags: rural innovation
Agritourism is a critical farm diversification strategy for farmers to enhance income and profit potential with benefits related to rural community development, increased awareness of sustainability practices, and local heritage preservation. For rural community and economic development professionals, agritourism has become an important strategy to develop local tourism, grow small businesses, and enhance regional economic diversification. We propose that the agritourism ecosystem would arguably benefit from more robust Extension programming and network development. A discussion of two state case studies, Vermont and California, provides an overview of the critical elements necessary to build a statewide agritourism program. The role of Extension in rural development and tourism underscores the opportunity to utilize agritourism as a broader development strategy. Finally, we make recommendations for growing the role of Extension in agritourism. More robust training and education for Extension professionals, stronger connections to state tourism departments, and more robust advocacy with university and state-level decision makers on the value of agritourism investments are all highlighted as crucial next steps.
Authors: Claudia Schmidt, Lisa Chase, Carla Barbieri, Ellie Rilla, Doolarie Singh Knights, Dawn Thilmany, Stacy Tomas, Lori Dickes, Sarah Cornelisse, R. David Lamie, Rachael Callahan, Holly George, and Penny Leff
Publication: Applied Economics Teaching Resources Date Published: July 1, 2022
Facility locations are crucial determinants of supply chain efficiency for aggregating and distributing products. The multi-disciplinary nature of the facility location problem requires multiple complementary approaches, at different levels of aggregation, to accommodate the salient features of location determinants. This study examines the facility location problem for the U.S. fresh produce supply chain. We present a model that incorporates an empirical scenario into a facility location problem in order to capture much of the information required to make an optimal location decision. Our results suggest that the reliability of facility locations can be improved without significantly increasing the operating costs. This study sheds light on how the application of complementary modeling approaches improves the effectiveness of facility location solutions.
Authors: Houtian Ge, Stephan J. Goetz, Rebecca Cleary, Jing Yi, Miguel Gómez
Publication: International Journal of Production Economics Date Published: July 1, 2022
We use county-level data to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the tourism and hospitality sector, which was by far the most impacted of all sectors, focusing on employment and wage changes. Results support our hypothesis that rural counties experienced fewer negative impacts or even benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of job growth. We present maps showing the pandemic’s effects on leisure and hospitality (L&H) employment across the nation, identifying the communities both hardest hit and least impacted. A linear regression model is developed to explore independent factors that influenced the pandemic’s local impact. Results are robust across different measures of the key variable (rurality), including rural-urban continuum codes, distance from metropolitan areas, and population density. We also consider the impacts of social capital, income, and local economic diversification, among other factors. Our results suggest that remote, less-populated counties were more likely to experience stable employment in the L&H sector relative to pre-pandemic levels, and in some cases even experienced employment growth.
Authors: Luyi Han, Stephan J. Goetz, Daniel Eades, Jason Entsminger, Doug Arbogast
Publication: Tourism Economics Date Published: June 16, 2022
Tags: COVID-19
This study highlights the results of a national survey of Extension land-grant and sea grant professionals designed to better understand their involvement in state/regional tourism programming and their perceptions of tourism related opportunities and challenges. This study demonstrates the breadth and importance of Extension’s tourism programing and continued challenges including limited investment and commitment by state institutions and the larger CES for core tourism program offerings. Investments in tourism programing are recommended as a way for Extension to maintain its relevancy, and better engage and address the community and economic development needs of traditional and emerging audiences.
Authors: Doug Arbogast, Daniel Eades, Stephan J. Goetz, and Yuxuan Pan
Publication: Journal of Extension Date Published: May 9, 2022
Tags: Other, Test Tag
