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In 1997, busloads of Japanese tourists started driving out to the Stone family cattle ranch near Winters for a peek at the Old West. The Stones gave the Japanese a tour of the ranch and cooked them a nice barbecued-beef supper. But the tourists clamored for more.
They wanted something from a gift shop.
Today, in addition to the tours, 7,500-acre Yolo Land & Cattle Co. offers several food product lines' including beef jerky, beef sticks: honey gleaned from the prickly yellow star thistle in the pastures and bay leaves picked from laurel trees growing wild on the ranch.
Yolo Land & Cattle is first and foremost a cattle ranch, but there's reason to branch out.
"The cattle business is pretty static right now," said Casey Stone, part-owner of the ranch.
The Stones' forays into agritourism and specialty foods are, part of a trend among farmers and ranchers to diversify.
A Woodland company, Stonyford Group LLC, last year converted a working horse and cattle ranch into a resort for small groups of executives. And bed and breakfast establishments are popping up on farms. The extent of the trend toward agritourism is difficult to nail down, though.
The University of California has an Agri-tourism Database of 63 businesses in a nine-county swath from San Joaquin to Butte and Glenn - but the UC definition of agritourism is...