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Despite the interest in non-profit and sustainable ways of connecting farms to society, less is known about how to conduct this through digital technology and communication. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how to connect farms to society through digital technology and communication.

In-depth interviews of 15 Australian farmers were conducted in order to understand their perceptions of how to engage in digital forms of social entrepreneurship and thematic analysis techniques were utilized to understand the content from the interview transcripts.

The findings suggest that digital social farm entrepreneurship can be categorized into social bricoleurs, social constructionists and social engineers.

This typology helps to understand the contextual role farm entrepreneurs play in rural economies and their place in global societies.

Many Australian farms are in remote locations far from urban centers, which makes digital forms of social entrepreneurship an important way that farmers can promote social entrepreneurial ventures.

This paper highlights how there has been a growing interest in developing social entrepreneurship in Australian farms due to their connection with rural communities and environments.

Sustainable entrepreneurship is crucial for the ongoing viability and growth of rural economies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of farm entrepreneurs in the sustainable development of rural regional areas by focusing on the Sunraysia farming community in Australia.

The theoretical framework of evolutionary economics is utilized to understand the process of sustainable entrepreneurship for entrepreneurs in rural areas and a case study design is utilized to build theory linking place attachment, innovation legitimacy, and coopetitive behavior to sustainable farm entrepreneurship. The case studies are analyzed using an inductive approach to make theoretical contributions to rural and sustainable entrepreneurship.

The key findings are that coopetition is necessary amongst sustainable farm entrepreneurs in order to induce a culture of innovation.

This study focuses on the Sunraysia region of Australia so might be limited in scope and replication to other geographic areas.

This study focuses on the role of rural regional areas and the special entrepreneurial characteristics of the Sunraysia region due to immigration and location advantages.

This paper aims to explore how gender is “done” on farms in Sweden in the context of increased tourism and hospitality activities. The authors seek to investigate how gender is done vis-à-vis women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship. They seek to answer the questions: What has motivated the farm women to become tourism entrepreneurs? How are the gendered divisions of labor changed through women starting businesses? How does the gendered associated symbolism, as well as the identities, change?

Research has indicated that introducing tourism entrepreneurship at farms may challenge established gender relations, as many of these entrepreneurs are women. The empirical material consists of in-depth interviews with 15 women farm tourism entrepreneurs in central Sweden.

The analysis suggests that the gendered divisions of labor are not changed through the interviewed women starting tourism businesses. The authors conclude that the women build their entrepreneurship and develop some of their products on an image of rural domesticity, including a representation of themselves as traditional farm women. At the same time they are changing how gender is done through identifying as entrepreneurs and changing the use of the farms.

The authors seek to fill the research gap concerning women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship and the potential associated gendered changes. Their theoretical contribution is applying the perspective of “doing gender” and entrepreneurship, for delineating potential changes in gendered relations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a sector-based analysis of the drivers for social entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector.

The paper uses qualitative data from two studies in the Danish region of Northern Jutland. The data include responses from 38 farmers who offered or had considered offering social services. The analytical framework is taken from a review of the limited literature on Green Care and Social Farming and social entrepreneurship theory.

Strong and consistent tools for the categorisation of farmers’ social entrepreneurship have been developed. However, these tools have merely been used descriptively rather than to create proactive agriculture policies to facilitate social entrepreneurship. In Region Northern Jutland social entrepreneurship in farming is driven by a combination of tradition, close relationships and coincidence. It is ad hoc, with each initiative starting from scratch because no knowledge or experience has been gathered or distributed.

The agricultural sector-based approach to social entrepreneurship will not be discussed against other approaches to social entrepreneurship. This would be a suggestion for another more conceptual kind of article in the future.

A study of social entrepreneurship among farmers has not yet been coupled with a sector-based analytical framework. This paper contributes to the literature of social entrepreneurship by supplementing with an agricultural sector-based approach.

This study aims to explore the shift in social and cultural values in the wake of ongoing change; specifically, the degree of embeddedness of these values among farm-based entrepreneurs. The authors examine how this value-change-embeddedness continuum can further the development of theories in the field of social entrepreneurship.

The authors use an exploratory and a descriptive approach when interviewing eight farmers and members of their respective households. The sample encompasses almost all the providers of farm-based tourism in this particular area of rural Norway. The empirical materials form the basis for selecting our theoretical approach, one of which is a structural life-mode analysis.

The findings show that the social value of self-reliance, when taken to extremes, can hinder the growth of deeper commercial cooperation between farmers. This constitutes a challenge to efficiency and effectiveness on a larger scale, given a need for both independence and interdependence together with flexible entrepreneurial network cooperation in social entrepreneurship. The findings also indicate that social entrepreneurship does not necessarily have to include a cognitive shift in values and roles for the exclusion of a productive entrepreneurial identity.

By focusing on value changes in social entrepreneurship, this paper addresses a significant gap in the entrepreneurship literature relating to the process of value creation. By using the structural life-mode analysis, this study identifies the underlying value changes that are fundamental to entrepreneurial processes, allowing that process to unfold and take hold to the betterment of affected farm-based communities.

There is a recent growing interest to find a lasting intervention to rural poverty (RP) in developing countries based on farmer entrepreneurship and innovation. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the relation between entrepreneurship and RP alleviation in two resource-constrained provinces of China. This paper assesses the influence of three capabilities of farm entrepreneurs – educational, economic and socio-cultural – on farmer entrepreneurship growth and how these, in turn, impact alleviation of RP.

Household survey data comprising 363 respondents were taken from four deprived communities in two provinces of China. The paper employed structural equation modeling (SEM), using AMOS 21.0 alongside SPSS 20.0 to test the relations between the constructs.

The results show that a statistically significant and positive relation exists between entrepreneurship and RP alleviation in China. The findings of the study further reveal that qualitative growth of entrepreneurship has a stronger positive influence on RP alleviation than on quantitative growth, and socio-cultural capabilities of respondents significantly and positively affect entrepreneurial growth of farmers, rather than education and economic capabilities.

The use of data from four communities in two provinces tends to limit the ability to generalize the findings of the study. Furthermore, the survey did not collect information on non-farm entrepreneurs, making it impossible to compare the findings from farm entrepreneurs with non-farm entrepreneurs.

The findings have practical implications for policy makers in rural China toward addressing targeted RP. This paper, therefore, suggests that entrepreneurship should be pursued vigorously among farmers in rural areas of China to help solve poverty. The paper also presents a useful lesson for various stakeholders in poverty alleviation programs in other developing countries.

This paper contributes to the academic literature on the entrepreneurship–RP alleviation nexus by combining the theory of capability and SEM in the analysis of an emerging economy such as China.

Entrepreneurship is currently at the focus of much theoretical, practical and political interest. In Europe, agriculture has faced dramatic pressures for restructuring, and facilitation of the entrepreneurial skills of farmers and stronger entrepreneurial orientation in the rural areas have been hailed as possible solutions for the emerging problems. The aim of this paper is to use this nexus of agriculture and entrepreneurship as an illustrative example, through which the nature of entrepreneurial skills and the elements underpinning their adoption can be examined.

The task is carried out by reflecting theoretically on the concept of entrepreneurial skills and on their embedded nature, before demonstrating the usefulness of the concept as a tool in understanding the case of an enterprising Finnish farmer, active both in conventional farming and in diversified business.

The theoretical and case study analyses reveal that the concept of entrepreneurial skills is far from an unambiguous one, as well as is the aim to develop them through teaching. If proper care is taken to distinguish the concept from, and relate it to, the elements in which it is embedded, the notion is a useful tool for empirical investigation. By applying such a procedure, it is shown that the contexts of conventional farming and business diversification call for clearly different entrepreneurial skills, some of which are more amenable to teaching than others.

This paper shows how one can develop a fuller understanding of the skills that farmers need to become entrepreneurial by diversification.

This paper aims to explore the market creation practices of farm-based entrepreneurs in the local food sector. Alternative marketing channels for farm-based products increase, but it is not known how entrepreneurs work to position their products in the marketplace. By expanding on the research of farm-based entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial marketing (EM), this study explores the entrepreneurial practices that farm-based entrepreneurs use through the lens of the EM mix (EMM) and its constituent dimensions: person, purpose, practice and process.

The study uses a multiple case study design and follows a phenomenological approach in conducting in-depth retrospective interviews with 11 successful farm-based entrepreneurs in the local food sector in Norway.

The thematic analysis revealed four key EM practices of the study’s farm-based entrepreneurs: transferring the farm or transforming the farm as the primary purpose; legitimising a local brand through the uniqueness of person, purpose and place; using a personal networking approach in the market development process and flexible and controllable market expansion practices. These elements constitute the pillars of successful, creative and resource-efficient market development.

The study represents a pioneering attempt to explore and conceptualise EM within farm-based entrepreneurship. The findings ultimately give rise to a novel framework: the farm-based entrepreneur’s marketing mix (FEMM).

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the success of a scheme, supported by the Ugandan Agribusiness Initiative Trust, to fund gender and entrepreneurship training for women farmers in the north of Uganda (Gulu District and Lira District). Moreover, this paper reflects upon our experience of delivering training for women farmers and highlights key observations related to women’s entrepreneurship in Uganda.

A practitioner-based reflection which shares the experiences of the process of developing and delivering gender and entrepreneurship training for women in Uganda.

Through the experience of running gender and entrepreneurship training for women farmers in Uganda, a series of barriers to female rural entrepreneurs are highlighted: lack of access to credit, gender inequality, poor infrastructure, lack of access to knowledge and education, negative attitudes towards women and few initiatives to facilitate economic and business success.

This paper provides reflection of the experience gained from the delivery of training and interaction with women farmers and entrepreneurs in Uganda.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly being recognised as a vehicle for bringing about the development of different economic sectors in various geographical regions, and it is believed to result in greater productivity and entrepreneurial performance in agriculture. To date, there are no empirically verified holistic models focussing on the development of agricultural entrepreneurship in an African context. This study aims to fill this gap by developing an agricultural entrepreneurial development model (AEDM) that provides a basis for enhancing entrepreneurial performance in the agriculture sector.

First, a holistic conceptual AEDM was built from the extant literature with a focus on the African context and encompassing dimension of the enabling environment, entrepreneurial performance and its outcomes. Then, the model was tested empirically by conducting a survey with 477 farmers in Namibia who benefit from Namibia’s National Resettlement Programme and the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme. The model was tested statistically using partial least square-structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that a supportive environment, entrepreneurial orientation and agricultural sustainability exert a positive impact on entrepreneurial performance in agriculture, which, in turn, leads to greater agricultural productivity and increased income for farmers.

The study theoretically develops and empirically tests a holistic model of agricultural entrepreneurship development. The value of the model lies in its consideration of a plethora of enabling-environment antecedents of entrepreneurial performance in agriculture, as well as some specific organisational- and individual-level outcomes thereof. Therefore, it offers policymakers and practitioners a blueprint for developing agricultural entrepreneurship in an African context.