City-Bred Tourists Flock for a Visit Down on the Farm : Agriculture: Misty Meadow’s owners balance daily chores with tending to thousands of guests.

ROMULUS, N.Y. —  A 400-pound sow known as No. 484 is stretched out in utter repose with one bleary-eyed piglet pulling at a teat, the other 10 somnolent in the hay. They’re 4 days old.

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“She gave birth in front of 50 to 60 people,” hog farmer Fred Sepe says during a guided tour of Misty Meadow Farm, his refuge in the heart of the Finger Lakes. “She performed very well.”

Sightseers are getting unusual access to that most venerable of American institutions--the working farm. More than a dozen farms around New York state and hundreds nationwide have opened their gates to visitors over the past decade or two, often to help avoid going out of business.

For 10 weeks each summer, Fred and Anne Sepe invite people to ramble around their 150-acre spread alongside Cayuga Lake. The couple somehow balances the daily farm work with educating and amusing thousands of guests.

“I think that everybody’s infatuated with the farm,” Sepe said. “People are really looking for a simpler way of life. When they see farming, they kind of just want to touch it. And this is a heaven for kids.”

In the barn, boys are taking turns jumping in the hay. Outside, two 6-year-old girls have cornered a flock of ducklings, hoping to grab a cuddle. The tractor-drawn hay wagon is pulling out again, laden with families, for a ride into fields of sunflowers, soybeans and hay.

Once they get used to the country smells--one child got a chorus going on the hay wagon with her “Eeee-uuuu!” declaration--youngsters are usually busy feeding the turkeys, chickens, woolly sheep, geese, ducks, miniature goat and the least sleepy of the 1,400 hogs.

Or gamboling in the fields, collecting sunflowers and barley stalks.

It’s an urban dweller’s dream, as the Sepes can attest. The fifty-something couple, who grew up in New York City, tried out a 13-acre “hobby farm” in New Jersey before moving their five children to upstate New York in 1976.

Misty Meadow is one of 11 veal, dairy and hog farms that stretch along a country road east of this village. It was such a big hit with local schoolchildren on field trips and passersby asking to take a gander that the Sepes opened it to tourists in 1982.

“We had to increase revenue somehow, and being from the city, I know what it is to ride around the roads and ask, ‘What is this farm doing, what is that farm doing?’ ” Sepe said.

Farming hasn’t been an easy going for the Sepes. The profit-per-hog has shrunk over the years, forcing many hog farmers to expand or sell out. The couple was forced to file for bankruptcy in the 1980s.

But business has picked up again, helped by the day-tripper trade.

The tourist season means many early starts getting the animals fed and cleaned, moving hogs from pen to pen as they mature and dispensing with breeding, tail-cropping and castrations. And repairs.

“Hogs are probably the most destructive farm animal,” Sepe said. “They have nothing to do except try and rip things apart.”

On the guided tour, “we try and tell people a little bit about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it,” Sepe said. Then he’ll recommend the self-guided tour.

“We found that a lot of people want to just hang around,” he said.

“We had one couple last year spent three days here. He and his wife just sat on a tree and read for three days, turning their three boys loose. They said it was their best vacation they ever had.”