Farmer Entrepreneurship: Problems and Prospects of Growing a Business on the Farm

In our rush to embrace exciting new entrepreneurial firms like Google and Starbucks, we may risk forgetting the original American entrepreneur: the farmer. Consolidation and the rise of corporate agriculture have created tough times for the family farm, but in many regions, farm-based entrepreneurship is growing.

A recently posted report from Iowa State’s Department of Sociology examines the issues around farm-based entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has become a critical component in local efforts to preserve family farms. An earlier survey in Iowa found that 21% of farmers operate a second business outside of their farming operation. Most of these businesses are in agriculture-related fields, such as manufacture of farming equipment or other types of food production. The challenges facing these business owners are not a whole lot different from those facing urban entrepreneurs. At the top of their list of challenges was access to outside financing and access to more sophisticated business services—especially in the area of marketing.

The September 2005 Iowa State University Sociology Research Brief, Farmer Entrepreneurship: Problems and Prospects of Growing a Business on the Farm, by Peter Korsching and Carly Jacobs, is available at: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/Publications/SRB2005-2.pdf

Thanks to the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/ for passing this along. Russ