What is Agritourism?

What is Agritourism, you ask? Simply stated, agritourism could be thought of as the crossroads of tourism and agriculture. Stated more technically, agritourism can be defined as a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and/or processing with tourism in order to attract visitors onto a farm, ranch, or other agricultural business for the purposes of entertaining and/or educating the visitors and generating income for the farm, ranch, or business owner. And it's coming to SoDP!

Inclusion is a culture that SoDP is committed to spreading around the world. And the Greenhouse within our community provides an opportunity to provide a culinary and educational tool that can help cultivate a vibrant community as well as develop life skills to ALL abilities using these amazing indoor/outdoor gardens. These tools, Aeroponic Vertical Gardens, designed by 1 of the 12 Disney Epcot scientists, will allow and provide the opportunity to embark on the technological and agricultural wave of the future. Aeroponic Vertical Gardening provides the perfect platform to educate the young and young at heart about healthy living, sustainability and life-long habit forming. The application of BOTH indoor and outdoor growing will allow our recipients to use what they have experienced and eaten to inspire healthy living in their daily lives through the educational tool of sustainable, organic growing.

SoDP will be a model of diversity, equality, and inclusion, as it brings together an extremely marginalized population of diseased and disabled to partner with the healthy and able-bodied for fun and adventure together. Our goal is to provide life skills training and potential job opportunities to groups like Ranken Jordan, TASK, Best Buddies, Autism Speaks, Down Syndrome Association, Shriner's Hospital and both Children's Hospital's, who all serve the disabled community, in St Louis, MO, not to mention our Veteran organizations.

Research shows that when children of ALL abilities grow vegetables, they eat vegetables. With our argitourism model, SoDP can encourage healthy lifestyle habits among children (without the hassles soil gardening — such as digging, weeding, and messes).

Using NASA-grade growing technology and providing low operational costs makes the Greenhouse at SoDP a smarter choice for our budget-conscious organization. And with no need to dig or weed, the gardening allows you to spend less time maintaining and more time enjoying the fruits of our labor (literally).

Facts, Features about our Agritourism Greenhouse

FEATURES & BENEFITS:

· Uses 90% less space.

· Uses 90% less water.

· Uses less than 1% electricity.

· Grows 3 times as quickly.

· Produces 3 times as much.

· Pays for itself within 6 months.

· Cost effective, hands-on, authentic approach to reinforce sustainability and healthy eating; plug, plant and pick process.

· Ensuring the healthiest, organic diet available free of pesticides and herbicides.

· Natural, calming affect that soothes as a direct result from trickling of water that goes off every 15/45 minutes, depending on INDOOR or OUTDOOR growing.

These tools are the wave of the future are we are excited to bring them to you! For more information, please visit our website.