Try some agri-tourism: Indiana is well-positioned as more farms are willing to welcome, educate and entertain visitors.

• Author: Weber, Becky
• Position: Tourism

THE EGG LADY ... ON Saturday mornings we piled in the car and went to visit the egg lady and buy some of those funny brown eggs. We ran around the farm, checked out the chickens and held our noses at the "fresh country air." I was 5, maybe 6 years old.

Johnson's Strawberry Farm in Noble County: Now that's where I learned about berry-pickin' backaches offset by the wonder of shortcake made with freshly picked strawberries. I was maybe 14 or 15 by then.

My first "real" job at WANE-TV News in Fort Wayne provided the perfect excuse to check out both traditional and specialized crops grown in Indiana. I discovered the mint farms in northwest Indiana (Indiana is in the top five states growing peppermint and spearmint), the Campbell's Soup mushroom farm near Brighton, Weaver Popcorn near Van Buren and the Maple Leaf duck farm near Milford.

It turns out I have been a closet agri-tourist since long before we assigned a name to it. So have a lot of other folks. A recent Travel Industry Association of America report says that 75 percent of us "city dwellers" are curious about where our food comes from and increasingly interested in tire rural lifestyle.

This junction of farm operations and tourism is now called agri-tourism, and it is quickly becoming a profitable niche. Jane Eckert, a farm operator who is perhaps the country's best-known advocate for agri-tourism, spoke at the Lt. Governor's Tourism Conference this spring. She said Indiana is well positioned to embrace agri-tourism. A good number of us do our leisure travel by car, and there are an increasing number of farms willing to welcome, educate and entertain visitors.

The Indiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Indiana Tourism--with help from many, many other groups and organizations--are currently completing a comprehensive inventory of Indiana agri-tourism resources. It will expand upon and complement several existing lists of farm markets and rural attractions. You know some of them well: Huber's down near Starlight, The Forest Discovery Center not far from Huber's, Hilger's Farm Market west of Fort...