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.

Online marketplaces could help direct-to-consumer (DTC) farms compete for customers making grocery purchases on the internet by reducing the search and transportation costs of in-person DTC transactions. While in-person DTC marketplaces have been conducive for metropolitan farms historically, we explore whether rural DTC farms, with distance-based challenges accessing customers, are more likely to have online platforms. We find that rural farms distant from metropolitan counties that are new to DTC marketing are 7% more likely to have online marketplaces than more experienced rural farms, while new metropolitan farms are less likely to have them.