Tyrol agencies co-fund regenerative farming tourism push

Tyrol’s agriculture, tourism and regional development departments are co-funding a two-year programme that links regenerative farming with the hospitality sector, placing public money behind an effort to reshape how food reaches the region’s tourism tables. The initiative, TUI Field to Fork Austria, is being launched by the TUI Care Foundation in partnership with Futouris and BIO AUSTRIA, with additional support from the Institute for Tourism Sustainability. The cooperation is framed as part of the Tyrolean Sustainability and Climate Strategy, with the stated objective of strengthening regional value creation while connecting environmental protection, resilient agriculture and tourism.

The state’s backing reflects structural pressures its departments must answer for. Around 80% of Tyrol’s agricultural land lies in mountainous areas, where steep terrain raises production costs and makes farming more labour intensive. Climate change adds further strain through increasingly frequent extreme weather events, while small farm structures and generational change affect the long-term viability of agricultural businesses. These same farms maintain the landscapes, biodiversity and food culture on which the region’s tourism industry depends, a dependency that gives the investment a dual economic and environmental rationale.

Under the programme, around 25 grassland and arable farms in the Tyrolean lowlands and Innsbruck region will receive intensive training and technical support to adopt practices defined within the programme as regenerative. These include methods that improve soil health, support soil biology and protect against erosion, with the aim of building farm-level biodiversity and greater resilience to weather-related pressures. Progress will be tracked throughout the two years, a monitoring commitment that gives funders and partners a basis for assessing whether the stated goals are being met.

Beyond the core group, a wider circle of farmers and food producers will be reached through training and awareness activities, with around 145 people from agriculture and food production expected to take part. On the demand side, at least eight hotels and gastronomy businesses will be supported to incorporate regeneratively produced food into their purchasing and culinary offers. A further 200 tourism and food-service professionals, among them hotel managers, chefs, procurement teams and restaurant staff, will be engaged. According to the partners, new relationships between farmers, wholesalers and tourism businesses are intended to create more reliable regional supply chains and expand market opportunities for locally produced food.

Alexander Panczuk, Managing Director of the TUI Care Foundation, framed the collaboration as a matter of working through local partners rather than around them. “Tourism thrives on what makes a region unique, its people and its cultural heritage,” he said. “Working with local partners is therefore fundamental. In Tyrol, we want to work together with farmers and the tourism sector to create new experiences, offer visitors more regional products and strengthen local value creation. In this way, collaboration can translate into tangible change that inspires visitors while creating new opportunities for local people.”

Meanwhile, the programme also aims to move regenerative agriculture beyond procurement policy and into the visitor experience itself. Farmers, chefs, tourism organisations and other local partners will jointly develop offers such as farm visits, farm-to-table experiences, tastings and cooking workshops, potentially allowing visitors to see where their food comes from and learn how healthy soils, biodiversity and agricultural traditions shape the landscapes they encounter on holiday.

TUI Field to Fork Austria sits within the TUI Care Foundation’s international Field to Fork programme, which supports farming communities in transitioning to regenerative practices designed to bolster biodiversity and sustain local culinary traditions. The approach has already been applied in destinations including Cabo Verde, Tanzania, Colombia, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Italy, where it is intended to create new income opportunities for farmers and local producers and to build short supply chains with the local tourism sector.

The institutional partners bring distinct mandates to the collaboration. Futouris e.V. is the sustainability initiative of the German-speaking tourism industry, a non-profit association that develops and implements projects worldwide with its member companies and local partners, focusing on practical solutions and knowledge transfer. BIO AUSTRIA is the network of Austria’s organic farmers and, as the largest organic farming association in Europe, represents the country’s organic farming sector and advocates for farmers’ interests, with almost 500 partner companies from the business sector.

The TUI Care Foundation itself, an independent charitable organisation founded by TUI and based in the Netherlands, supports and initiates projects intended to create opportunities and contribute to thriving communities in tourism destinations worldwide. Its work spans education and training for young people, protection of natural habitats and the marine environment, and support for communities benefiting sustainably from tourism. Further information is available at www.tuicarefoundation.com, https://www.futouris.org/en and https://www.bio-austria.at/.

What remains to be seen is whether the two-year monitoring commitment produces evidence strong enough to shape Tyrol’s longer-term agricultural and tourism policy.