Aspects of tourism sustainability on organic farms in Slovenia

Abstract

In 2020, 957 tourist farms in Slovenia were offering accommodation and/or food and beverages. Due to the legal framework (the law requires a high minimum percentage of own production), the offer of Slovenian tourist farms is strongly linked to their own agricultural production and the local rural environment. The paper addresses various aspects of sustainable rural tourism, focusing on organic tourist farms. The research?s goal was to find out whether Slovenian organic tourist farms are more sustainable than other (non-organic) tourist farms in terms of the presence of various elements (environmental friendliness, biodiversity preservation and nature conservation, equity and social justice, economic success) of sustainable tourism. These elements were selected to address all the three dimensions of sustainability-environmental, social, and economic. The research used secondary sources data on organic production and various sustainable tourism practices on tourist farms (accessible tourism, sustainable tourism labels, links with protected areas, etc.) and some other relevant characteristics of these farms (the production of native and traditional crop varieties). In addition, a survey was conducted on a random sample of 129 tourist farms. The results have shown that the assumption of greater sustainability of organic tourist farms is valid, not only in the system of agricultural production, which is the legally established basis for labeling the farm as organic, but also from some other aspects (greater representation of sustainable labels, greater presence of native/traditional varieties and breeds, more frequent links with protected areas, etc.).