Five steps to crisis-proof your agritourism operation

Imagine a guest at your winery breaks an ankle on uneven ground. Or a severe thunderstorm rolls in during an evening corn maze. Or a foodborne illness concern is reported on social media.

Stacey Stearns, a communications specialist for UConn Extension, wants agritourism operations to have an emergency response framework in place – one you can turn to whether you’re facing a small incident or a full-blown crisis.

“One of the main reasons that we talk about this is it can lead to economic losses and closure on your farm, which none of us really want to have,” Stearns said. “The purpose for us talking about it is bigger than that. You want to be a good neighbor. You want to be a good member of your community. You want to share your farm and have people enjoy it.”

Assess Risks

Assessing risk is the first step in a crisis management planning framework. Start by reflecting on the potential issues that could happen on your farm. Risks can include weather-related events, injuries, visitor-caused incidents like trips and falls and force majeure events. Liability-derived issues – crises that often stem from something on the farm that should have been addressed and wasn’t – are another form of risk.

Stearns encouraged choosing three risks that are most likely or that keep you up at night. “Your plan doesn’t have to include every possible scenario, because it’ll be demoralizing and overwhelming,” she said.

Identify Audience

The next step is to identify the audiences affected by those risks. Start with the obvious: customers, employees and family members involved in the operation. Then expand to consider who else your business interacts with, such as neighbors, vendors and subcontractors. Don’t forget other stakeholders who could be affected by publicity around an emergency at your location.

“If you’re part of a trail or anything like that, your local audience is important too. You want to really think about all those audiences, not just your customers,” Stearns said.

Create Message Templates

Templates aren’t verbatim messages; they’re generic messages you can adapt to respond to a specific incident. “These are templates that you can say, ‘Okay, I identified this risk of a person breaking their ankle in my apple orchard. If that were to happen, here are some messages that I would potentially use,’” Stearns said.

Message templates should be clear and provide updates. If it’s written communication, especially for an insurance company, include timestamps. Messages should also convey concern and empathy for those affected and avoid speculation. Rather than saying, “We are investigating an alleged incident that may have occurred,” consider “We’re aware of an incident involving a guest. Our priority is their well-being, and we’re cooperating with emergency responders.”

In addition to templates, operations should have a standard incident report form ready to fill out.

Assign Roles

The next step is assigning roles, both to help prevent an incident and to respond if one occurs. On a smaller agritourism operation, one or two people might fill all of these roles.

One role is the safety officer, who might be in charge of inspecting any infrastructure a farm visitor will interact with.

In the event of an incident, someone should be trained as the communication lead – the person responsible for relaying messages to employees, volunteers and family. “If something happens on your farm, if you’ve got the person with a broken ankle, you shouldn’t have all employees talking to everybody about it. If the media comes, there should always be that one consistent spokesperson,” Stearns said.

A guest liaison is another key role. Imagine one guest out of 18 gets injured during a horseback riding experience. The guest liaison is responsible for making sure the remaining guests are still cared for and having a good experience, despite the incident.

Identify Communication Channels

Stearns emphasized the importance of identifying the channels an agritourism business already uses to communicate with its audiences so they can be leveraged quickly during an emergency.

Start with established channels: your website, social media, email list and text messaging service. Media partnerships can also help. Stearns recommended sharing positive stories with the press ahead of time, so a relationship already exists if an emergency happens.

Don’t overlook internal staff, who will inevitably field questions of their own. “You want to be able to have those messages already drafted up to share with those people,” Stearns said.

Whatever the channel, communicate early and often with both internal and external audiences.

Integrate Emergency Plans with Safety & Continuity Plans

According to Stearns, an agritourism operation should ideally have a safety plan, an emergency plan and a business continuity plan working in concert. A safety plan helps prevent an incident; an emergency plan outlines what to do immediately before or during one; and a continuity plan helps minimize the incident’s impact on the business and supports a return to normal operations as quickly as possible. All three can live in the same document.

“It’s so important for all these to work together in order for you to be as resilient as possible and as prepared as possible,” Stearns said.

One way to stress-test whether the safety, emergency and continuity plans actually function together is to use scenario planning. Stearns recommended using children’s toys to role-play a response to an incident or crisis.

“If you don’t have kids’ toys or if they won’t share, you can just draw it out on big flip chart paper so that you can look at it, look at that aerial of your farm, and then talk through how you would handle each of those scenarios,” Stearns said.

by Sonja Heyck-Merlin