Farm diversification, entrepreneurship and technology adoption : analysis of upland farmers in Wales
By Wyn Morris, Andrew Henley, D. Dowell. 2017
227 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Farm businesses face increasing challenges in the face of policy reform which envisages multifunctional rural economies with objectives which span the environmental, the social as well as the production of food. This leads to uncertainties and ambiguities in the way in which farms respond to incentives and pressures to become entrepreneurial, to diversify, to become more efficient at food production and to adopt new technology. This paper examines these tensions in the context of upland agricultural business in rural Wales. Qualitative and quantitative results support a conclusion of significant heterogeneity in farm response, and highlight tensions between maintaining a focus towards current on-farm activity or pursuing entrepreneurial diversification, as well as differing levels of technology adoption in support of these income streams. Supported by a descriptive cluster analysis based on survey data, the paper proposes a new conceptual categorisation of entrepreneurial strategy, distinguished on the basis of attitudes towards on- and off-farm income generation and on stated stance towards current and future policy grant streams. The paper discusses some of the factors that may determine how particular farmers and farming businesses lie within this categorisation.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e67db1a719920dee3019460da3c48f2cc6c99dd
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Citations in the corpus
- Adoption of climate‐smart agriculture among smallholder farmers: Does farmer entrepreneurship matter? (2021, background): “On the contrary, we argue that smallholder farmers continuously adapt to changing circumstances that affect their farming businesses (Morris et al., 2017).”
- Leverage Points for Governing Agricultural Soils: A Review of Empirical Studies of European Farmers’ Decision-Making (2018, background): “Relatedly, there has been little research so far on the attitude of farmers towards their own subsidy-dependence, though some indications can be found scattered in the literature that subsidy-dependence is met with discontent [69,107].”
- The digital divide: Implications for agribusiness and entrepreneurship. Lessons from Wales (2019, background): “The situation is even starker in areas where agriculture is dominated by upland faming where these farms face greater pressures on connectivity and a lack of innovation (Morris et al., 2017).”