The Study of the Relationship between Agriculture Produce Type and the Agricultural Tourist (Agrotourist) Attraction Feasibility in the Southern Khorasan Province

Abstract

Today, agricultural tourism is regarded as one of the stimulus for atonal economy of agriculture sector, a tendency for sentimental and nostalgic roots of a modern world citizen and some factors such as visit or participation in the farm activities, direct purchase of the farm products, spending one night in the farm, curiosity and learning about the agriculture farm and its products give the ability to create a society with an extensive goal. The southern Khorasan province with much potential in agriculture in the products like barberry, pomegranates and especially saffron and the capability of different tourisms such as natural tourism, astronomy, geotourism, and desert tourism, can accountably crystallize a special space in the field of agriculture or rural tourism. The present research aim is to identify the capabilities and capacities of the southern Khorasan Province tourism with regard to the priority categorization of the eligible arena that have the potential to attract tourist in order to promote the agricultural tourism. For this purpose, after the recognition of standards and sub-standards of agricultural tourism with utilization of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the software model SUPER DECISION, the agricultural tourism of southern Khorasan Province was explained and with the entry of qualitative and quantitative data 25 sub-standard model, the privilege of each town in the agriculture tourist attraction realization feasibility variable was determined and the towns of the province were positioned in four arena. Thereafter, the privilege of each town from the four sub-standards which had a relationship with the produce type variable was separately calculated. The Pearson correlation coefficient of these eight data pairs was in the 0.9, SPSS, software which demonstrated the existence of a significant relationship between the agrotourist attraction realization feasibility in the southern Khorasan province and the type of orchard and field agriculture produce.