BEAUMONT, Calif.—The route to Riley’s Farm starts at an exit off Interstate 10, followed by a nine-mile drive through the center of this bustling city, past the new subdivisions popping up everywhere and finally up a winding road.

“It’s off the beaten path,” cherry farmer Scott Riley says.

But that doesn’t stop folks from flocking by the hundreds to Riley’s farm each summer when the cherries are ready for picking. With the right kind of promotion, he figures, they will come year-round for the chance to hang out on a real farm, press their own apple cider and pick up a pie.

Riley is leading about a dozen farmers who banded together recently to promote agricultural tourism in response to Beaumont’s explosive growth.

The farmers are pushing for land-use reforms that would allow them to expand orchards and create bed-and-breakfast inns modeled after those in California’s wine regions.

They’re betting that such an agritourism district would attract some of the millions of people who travel on Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and the nearby desert resort town of Palm Springs each year, as well as inspire others to get into farming.

But Riley realizes there is one big obstacle in his way: the rapid urbanization of this former farm region 75 miles east of Los Angeles.

“We might be too late, what with everything gobbled up for housing here,” he said. “But we need to do something, or else we’re all going to dry up.”

The population in Beaumont has nearly doubled to about 23,000 during the past five years. Fruit trees, once ubiquitous on the local landscape, have been in decline the last several decades.

Cherry grower John Guldseth said at least 40 orchards were around when he started farming in 1973. Today, he estimated, only about 10 functioning cherry groves remain.

The fruit’s decline reflects that of many commodities in California, said Joe Elizondo, director of the Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship’s small farm program.

The business wasn’t lucrative and the children of many farmers chose not to continue. Most of those who did worked small plots that didn’t produce enough to supply increasingly larger, centralized markets, and they couldn’t compete with cheaper, imported crops.

Riley and other farmers who are adamant about preserving their way of life say the solution is to make a farm visit appealing to visitors looking for an urban escape.

They’d like to create an “ag adventure” map to point out fruit farms, pumpkin patches and other rural attractions in the San Gorgonio Pass, a swath of land between the San Bernardino National Forest and the San Jacinto Mountains.

Studies show the public’s interest in agritourism has grown. In a 2005 survey of 294 Northern California residents, 56 percent of respondents said they have participated in farm tourism and 57 percent said they were interested in agritourism, according to the study’s author, Desmond Jolly, director of the University of California Small Farm Program.

Jolly launched an agritourism project in Napa, Yolo and Solano counties in 2000 as a response to rapid growth in that region, which lies between Sacramento and San Francisco.

In Beaumont, the farmers’ ideas coincide with a plan by city officials to preserve the small-town atmosphere by “weaving agriculture into the urban fabric,” said David Dillon, the city’s economic development director.

Talks are under way to reserve up to 2,000 acres for agriculture, Dillon said, and developers may set aside some mandated open space for fruit trees. The region’s main electrical utility, Southern California Edison, is also considering setting aside 500 acres of unused land for orchards.

“It’s true the cherry groves are few and far between,” Dillon said. “The city wants to bring them back.”