There’s a new term out there in the business world. It’s called “agritainment.” And no, it’s not about holding a square dance in the pea patch — but it might be a first cousin.

Lately I’ve read where some farmers around the country have applied some good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity and are supplementing their conventional farming endeavors with a bit of “show and tell.”

What they are doing is inviting the public out to experience farm life — for a fee of course.

I guess you could call this a “reality experience” given that some folks might well expect to find faucets on a milk cow.

This agritainment runs the gamut from visits to melon and pumpkin patches to actually allowing youngsters and adults to milk a cow. There was a time when the only non-farmer that could be seen milking a cow would be a politician. It was the epitome of “pressing the flesh.” I always thought it was “udderly ridiculous” for a politician who otherwise wouldn’t know which end the teats were on to get his photo taken milking a cow. Norman Rockwell has left the building.

I read one story where a farmer paid his fertilizer and seed bill by holding tours of the farm. I’m sure many of those visitors were surprised to find that it was a bit different from the old “Green Acres” television sitcom of the 1960s.

Now when I was growing up on the farm, the city cousins dearly loved to come out to the farm for a few days. It was special for them to eat the things we ate, to chase pigs, to feed cows and mules and pick butterbeans. I always tried to get them to move toward the butterbean patch. Ulterior motives.

But back then, never did we think we could turn this kind of fascination into a cover crop. It just never occurred to me that there would be folks out there who would enjoy getting up at 4 a.m. and unloading a barn of tobacco with sand pouring down in your eyes and down your shirt collar.

I really don’t think that event would have fit the “agritainment” profile. I think it would have to have been something much tamer like splitting a couple of red oak stumps into firewood or dumping a bucket of feed in the cow trough.

Now I was joking about the square dance in the pea patch, but that would be a good way to conclude the day — have one of those old-fashioned barn dances, except that our barn was always full of cows, mules, manure and oak snakes. Combined, those elements would have given new meaning to the term square dance.

In the movies, the barns were always clean where they had those dances. I’ve never actually seen one of those kinds of barns on a working farm. Maybe for “agritainment,” you could build one and pretend it was part of the operation.

Some of the farmers tie their “agritainment” to special occasions like fall festivals and Halloween. Kids like to choose their pumpkins, I’m told. And I suppose it would be easy to have a haunted barn and a headless horseman in Ichabod Crane motif. You might even let them bob for apples and sip some cider. And no, I wasn’t about to say bob for pickled pigs feet. You don’t use the good stuff in an event like this. You bring those out to celebrate the success of your “agritainment” — after the visitors have gone.

Now it might be some years before you see the word “agritainment” in the dictionary. I’m not even sure “heebeejeebies” is in there yet.

They say hindsight is always 20-20. Looking back, I think we could have put together a little enterprise even back then that would have been a new cash crop for us. Back then, I would have paid someone to pick butterbeans for me. How great it would have been for them to have paid me to let them pick my beans. My gosh, how would I have hidden a grin that big!

“Yo city boy! Ever cut tushes from a newborn pig? Naw, that sow won’t mess with you!”

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. E-mail: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)