Agritourism has grown rapidly in many countries worldwide. However, for all this success, little is known about the concrete implementation, actual extent, and effectiveness of public and private agritourism support measures aimed at keeping up farming and promoting agritourism. Hence, the objective of this study is to provide an overview and a comparison of agritourism supports and policies in different countries. To this purpose, specific political, legal, financial, and promotional instruments for agritourism have been investigated. The focus is on three countries with strong agritourism sectors and different socio-cultural characteristics: Italy, the USA, and South Africa. The analysis of these case study areas is motivated by examination of agritourism from different continents with a diverging status of development as well as history. Italy and the USA are two countries with well-established and successful agritourism sectors; however, these are based on very different framework conditions, resulting in specific development paths and various supportive driving factors. South Africa has been included as a representative case study of a developing country where agritourism operations are growing rapidly through the support of an active private sector association. By assessing commonalities and differences in public and private support backgrounds in three different continents, the present study represents the first exploratory attempt to understand the influences of public and private national and regional framework conditions for agritourism development. Our findings suggest that both public and private supports contribute to success; however, clear criteria and further research are needed in order to fully understand the implications.

Agri-tourism, which involves tourists visiting working farms for entertainment and learning, has become more popular over the years. This paper focuses on the supply side of agri-tourism and investigates the motives that South African farmers have for offering agri-tourism activities and attractions on their farm. Based on a study with 557 respondents from all nine provinces of South Africa, 148 respondents indicated that they were currently offering some form of agri-tourism. The results identified the most popular agri-tourism activities and attractions as farm stay/accommodation, hunting, hiking/nature trails, and wildlife viewing and photography. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted, which identified two factors, namely, preservation of culture and heritage and economic advantages. Based on the mean values, economic advantages were the main reason why farmers decided to offer agri-tourism activities and attractions.

While the agri-tourism sector is constantly growing, academic research on the development and management of this sector is limited in South Africa. The agri-tourism sector includes over thirty different activities and attractions. These can be categorised as outdoor recreation, educational experiences, entertainment, hospitality services or on-farm direct sales. It can be challenging to identify a single method for sustainability and success. Although many farmers develop agri-tourism products/services on their farms to generate additional income, several fail because of a lack of planning and management. Part of this planning is to identify the critical success factors needed to successfully manage an agri-tourism business. Research on the critical success factors of agri-tourism has been conducted in several countries, including India, the USA, Europe and Taiwan; however, a South African approach has not yet been investigated. This study aims to identify critical success factors needed to develop and manage agri-tourism within South Africa, based on various agri-tourism activities and attractions. By following a qualitative research method, these factors were identified through semi-structured in-depth interviews with farmers already managing a successful agri-tourism business. The findings indicated themes such as market research and marketing, customer satisfaction, staff including the need for employees to be happy, financial and business planning, employees’ and employer’s personalities, location and having a unique concept. These themes include elements such as a constant offering of quality products and services, being enthusiastic about your product/service, and understanding what your client wants. Many of these findings are consistent with the success factors identified in other countries, such as customer satisfaction, providing a quality product, good marketing methods and good customer service. As many respondents indicated a lack of prior planning and business analysis when developing their agri-tourism business, these success factors may be used as guidelines for South African farmers who do not know where to start when considering agri-tourism their farms.

Wine agri-tourism has expanded the role of wine farms beyond wine production to include hospitality, landscape, heritage and farm-based experiences. However, limited attention has been given to how wine farms visually communicate this wider agri-tourism identity through brand-managed Instagram images. This study therefore examines how selected South African wine farms visually communicate agri-tourism brand identity through brand-managed Instagram images. A qualitative visual content analysis was performed on 153 publicly available still images shared by four South African wine-farm accounts throughout the January–April 2025 harvest period. Employing a theory-based coding framework, each photograph was examined through six visual identity themes: place and landscape; wine, farm product and craft; hospitality and visitor experience; heritage and culture; lifestyle and aspiration; and farm authenticity and agricultural practice. The findings indicate that communication on Instagram was primarily influenced by hospitality and visitor experience identity, followed by wine, farm product, and craft identity. Images of place, heritage, lifestyle, and authentic farming emerged less often as primary themes but contributed additional layers of identity. The results show that certain South African wine farms utilise Instagram not only for promoting wine products, but also to establish themselves as experiential agri-tourism destinations. However, the authenticity of agricultural practices and working farms was less emphasised. The research adds to the literature on wine agri-tourism, brand identity, and destination marketing by demonstrating how Instagram images function as projected visual-identity material.