Events like Oyster River’s are the new frontier of Maine’s growing agritourism sector, says Ellen Sabina, outreach director for the Maine Farmland Trust. Just as some Maine farmers look to value-added products to help pad their bottom lines (selling, say, canned salsa made with farm-grown tomatoes), others hope to leverage more from their land by packaging an experience. According to the most recent USDA figures, income from farm-related agritourism in Maine rose 78 percent between 2007 and 2012, and Sabina suspects it’s only continued climbing since. The number of farms offering some sort of tourist activities — barn dinners to corn mazes — grew by 141 percent in the same period.

It’s a natural extension of the local-food movement, Sabina explains, “really giving people the opportunity to interact with the farm.”

“A lot of times,” she says, “the farms that are offering more casual events see themselves as offering a sort of community hub or meeting place, and that might be as much of a manifestation of an ideal as it is a business model.”

For Oyster River, it’s a bit of both. Though most of the farm and winery’s profits come from wholesale distribution and retail sales, Smith says pizza nights generate welcome added income and that they’ve amassed a loyal local following by providing a venue for neighbors to gather on a rural stretch of the coast with few shared hangouts.

For Katee Lafleur and Andrew White, of Montville’s High Ridge Farm, weekly taco nights are a much more deliberate part of their fledgling business’s economic model. From June through October, Lafleur and White welcome people into a beautifully renovated barn behind their post-and-beam farmhouse, both of which date to 1865. Out the barn’s back door are 35 acres of fields and woods that drew the couple to Maine from Vermont two years ago. And nearly all of the vegetables, apples, flowers, chickens, and hogs they grow and raise will end up on plates right there in the barn.

“This area is full of farms, with a lot of great CSAs, farmers’ markets chock full of amazing farms, and restaurants that are being supplied well already,” White explains. “So we thought, how can we farm and create a new market for our food instead of just competing with other great farms that are already out there?”

The answer was, in part, tacos. Friday taco nights at High Ridge find White stuffing crisp-edged carnitas or chile-stewed carrots into charred corn tortillas. Lafleur, meanwhile, doles out glasses and bottles of the farm’s first vintage of cider, a dry and nearly still affair that’s more earthy and tannic after two years in oak barrels than typical American ciders, all fizz and fruit. The tortillas are about the only thing on offer that aren’t sourced from the farm or, like some of the apples White picks from nearby abandoned cider orchards, from the immediate Knox County area.

Andrew White and Katee Lafleur took over Montville’s High Ridge Farm two years ago.

As they await their tacos, visitors wander in and out of the barn, some setting up spreads of BYO side dishes on tables and benches and in other cozy nooks, including a loft with a hammock. A pair of farm dogs are happy to accept scratches behind the ears from strangers. When she isn’t pouring, Lafleur guides people through the fields, describing what’s growing in each plot and pointing out shrubs where a litter of spotted piglets might be hiding out. Packs of children roam freely, chasing (or being chased by) a flock of pastured chickens or trying to catch frogs along the edge of the pond. People may come for the tacos, but most find reasons to linger well after dinner is finished.

High Ridge also hosts a monthly, reservations-only supper club, plated affairs that might feature smoked chicken or grilled, dry-aged pork chops. The dinners draw some of the same crowd, but taco night helps the bottom line, and White and Lafleur feel it’s important to offer an informal and affordable opportunity for the community to gather (the tacos are, in fact, available for a suggested donation, between $3 and $5; a glass of cider costs $6). When taco nights first kicked off last summer, during White and Lafluer’s first full season of farming and events at High Ridge, White says, “we’d just be sitting in the barn, wondering if anybody would come.” By the end of the season, though, “we were losing just enough to make it work,” and this summer’s attendance is off to a good start.

“It’s not lost on me that it isn’t exactly a viable farm model to say, ‘Get yourself an old barn and put a bunch of money into it — that’s the way to make a farm work,’” White admits. But the High Ridge barn — with its mottled shingles, soaring ceiling, and the stout, worn beams supporting the loft — simply took its new owners’ breath away. White and Lafleur sunk most of their savings into the barn to make it structurally sound, lifting it off an existing stone foundation to pour a concrete one that now doubles as a cider-making cellar.

“Once we did that,” White says, “we suddenly had a venue on our hands.”

Aesthetics, White and Lafleur realize, are an asset that small, largely hand-powered farms like theirs have in spades, certainly compared to industrial-scale operations. “People like to go up to Maine because it looks beautiful, smells beautiful,” White says. “But what’s there really to see on 1,000 acres of soybeans? I wouldn’t even say we’re able to honestly feed our community here, in a real sense — we aren’t supplying the number of calories a family needs to survive. What we are supplying is an experience.”

Part of that experience is a pretty killer taco, as creative and true to the Mexican style as you’ll find in the state. Part of the experience is eating that taco while looking out over a sunflower field at the enclosure where the pig that became your carnitas once lived a seemingly happy life. And in that sense, there’s no more fitting place to enjoy that taco than right there, in a beautiful barn on a beautiful farm on a backroad in Maine.