Agritourism—visiting a working farm for education or recreation—may serve as a tool to increase local food consumption as it often includes opportunities to purchase local food on-site. Yet, the influence of agritourism on consumers’ local food purchasing behavior remains underexplored. Thus, this study measures the impact of agritourism experiences on consumers’ intentions to purchase local food. To do so, visitors were surveyed at six agritourism farms with similar agritourism activities (e.g., U-pick, educational displays, and on-site market) located across North Carolina (USA) before (pre) and after (post) their visits ( n = 328). Data, collected during the 2018–2019 peak agritourism season, were analyzed using repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance. Findings indicate that agritourism experiences effectively increase consumers’ intentions to purchase local food. These findings advance the scholarship of agritourism. They also provide useful information to design effective marketing campaigns to promote the purchase and consumption of local food and strengthen local agricultural systems.

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While increasing agricultural literacy (AL) has been the focus of numerous educational programs, few AL scales have been developed specifically for children. AL programming struggles to rigorously evaluate their programs, particularly when little time is available for assessments in informal contexts. The lack of evaluation tools that allow to accurately measure educational impacts compromises progress on AL. In this paper, we present the development and validation of the Agricultural Literacy Instrument for Local Foods (ALI-LF) for children between the ages of 9 and 13. The instrument measures three domains of agricultural literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors). We pilot tested the instrument with children between 9 and 13 years old at a local arboretum and further validated the instrument at six agritourism farms. To analyze the data, we used principal component factor, Cronbach’s alpha, and descriptive statistics. The results support a comprehensive reliable instrument validated for informal contexts, such as farms offering recreational or educational activities to visitors (i.e., agritourism). This instrument fills the existing gap of adequate tools to evaluate AL programming which can support moving forward AL advances among children.

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