ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of agricultural landscapes, farming traditions and the rural idyll in the construction of heritage and its use in tourism. In agritourism, the farm of the past is desired to be a family-operated, pre-industrial, diverse crop farm, not an extensive, industrial monocrop one. Agriculture and the agricultural countryside are connected with national and cultural heritage. In part this stems from an anti-urban, romantic longing for nature, positioned as pure and restorative, particularly in Western urban industrial societies. Agricultural heritage based tourism distinctively invokes some degree of subjective nostalgia, or at least genuine curiosity. Indigenous people and rural residents throughout the world, particularly in less developed regions, consider themselves inseparable from the soil they cultivate. This evolutionary history and people's deep-seated bonds to the earth render agriculture and its associated landscapes vital cultural heritage wherever it is found personal heritage for farmers and villagers, interesting agricultural heritage for tourists and global heritage for anyone who eats.
