Tennessee Farm Makes the Most of School Tours

As a young boy growing up in Memphis, Tenn., Jeff Alsup dreamed of becoming a farmer like his grandfather. Every chance he got, Jeff would travel to his grandfather’s farm near Dexter in southeast Missouri.

While Jeff learned a lot about farming from his grandfather and loved every minute he spent on the farm, he didn’t think he could making a living doing it.

So he became an accountant.

Jeff also married the young lady who lived just down the road from his grandfather’s farm. While his wife Julie pursued her dream of teaching and raising the couple’s two children, Jeff worked as an accountant in Nashville, and continued to dream about being a farmer.

In 1995, the Alsups bought a 12-acre hobby farm 30 miles north of Nashville near Coopertown, Tenn. A couple years later, they hosted a fall festival on their farm for their church that was so successful it became an annual event.

“That’s what gave us the itch to get started giving school tours, which we began doing in 2003,” Jeff said. “Two years later, I quit my accounting job to work full time on the farm. Most folks thought I was insane to give up a steady paycheck and go into farming. But there’s not a lot of reward in accounting. Now, I’m working with my family for my family.”

Jeff and Julie shared their experiences in agritourism as presenters at the Wisconsin Agriculture Tourism Association conference, held earlier this year in Wisconsin Dells.

The Alsups’ original 12-acre hobby farm – which they named Honeysuckle Hill Farm – now encompasses 34 acres, and the couple has their eye on additional acreage.

Originally offering school tours, the Alsups have expanded into other activities, including pig races, musical entertainment, a sunset wagon ride, flashlight maze and – for older visitors – a Halloween haunted woods called Scream Creek. They recently added a farm market and certified commercial kitchen.

Honeysuckle Hill Farm is open just four months out of the year – April, May, September and October – yet had more than 40,000 visitors in 2009.

School tours are still the “bread and butter” of the Alsups’ business. Last year, some 15,000 students – primarily preschool through second grade – visited their farm.

As a teacher, Julie makes sure their farm tours meet the needs of the students and the teachers. The Alsups incorporate state curriculum standards into each of the programs they offer. For example, they reinforce what elementary students have been taught about the four seasons during their “Signs of Spring” program.

“Our tours are organized and structured,” Jeff said. “For one hour, the kids are learning, although we do it in a way that is fun for them. We have three retired teachers (on our staff) who are just great with the kids.”

Classes visiting the Alsups’ farm spend 15 minutes at each of four learning stations: the Learning Barn, the Petting Zoo, the Corn Maze and the Hayride. In the spring, the Alsups offer a program on plant life in addition to the Signs of Spring tour. Their fall programs include an apple orchard tour and a pumpkin patch tour.

Along with the main lesson taught in the Learning Barn, the students visit the petting zoo to learn about sheep, donkeys, goats, rabbits, chickens and pigs, while also getting a chance to milk a pretend cow. Afterward, the students are treated to a 15-minute scenic wagon ride around the farm and an educational scavenger hunt through a corn maze.

“The educational stuff keeps the teachers coming back. The fun stuff gets the kids to bring their parents back,” Jeff said.

After classes have visited all four learning stations, the teachers have the option of leaving the farm or staying longer to allow their students to play in the farm-themed playground areas, featuring such attractions as 40-foot slides, a jumping pillow, pedal cart track and a John Deere teeter-totter made from hay-rake wheels and old tractor seats.

The students can also ride a cow train, feed catfish in a pond, compete in rubber duck races or watch the pig races, featuring competitors with names like LeAnn Pork Rinds and Squeally Nelson.

In the petting zoo and catfish pond areas, the Alsups have feed dispensers that give customers a small handful of rabbit pellets or fish food for a quarter.

“There are some days that we can’t hardly keep those machines filled,” Jeff said.

Just before the groups leave Honeysuckle Hill, the children are invited to pick a pumpkin to take home, free of charge. Jeff grows about 50,000 of the 4- to 5-inch pumpkins, at a cost of about 15 cents each.

The Alsups recently built a second pavilion to provide two sites with picnic tables for the students to eat their sack lunches. The open-sided pole sheds are also rented out for family reunions, birthday parties, wedding receptions and other events during the off months.

As the Alsups’ operation has grown, so has their staff. On the busiest days of the season, they may have as many as 50 employees doing everything from greeting visitors to teaching kindergartners how pumpkin blossoms are pollinated.

The Alsups promote their school tours by mailing a full-color brochure to teachers within a 45-mile radius of their farm. Rather than mail just one brochure to a school district, they go the extra step of mailing one to each teacher in the primary grades.

“One teacher might not be interested in visiting our farm, but another just might be, so we send all the teachers a brochure. And I would suggest that you spend some money on your brochure and make it a good one,” Jeff told the audience.

The Alsups also use a coloring contest to advertise their farm. Sponsors pay for the prizes, including the $100 prize for the first-place winner. With the contest form is a coupon for one free student admission with the purchase of one adult ticket.

With as many as 2,500 visitors at their farm on weekends, the Alsups’ 3-acre parking lot is sometimes filled to capacity.

The fee for school tours at Honeysuckle Hill Farm is $6 per student. General admission tickets on the weekends are $9 per person (children under 2 are admitted free). Tickets for Scream Creek are $15 per person, or a package deal of $19 gives visitors access both to the haunted woods and on-farm activities.

For more information about Honeysuckle Hill Farm, click here.