Abulbasher, A.; Ulrich-Schad, J.; Kolady, D.; Wang, T.; Clay, D. Entrepreneurial Aspirations of South Dakota Commodity Crop Producers. Preprints2024, 2024061043. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.1043.v1
APA Style
Abulbasher, A., Ulrich-Schad, J., Kolady, D., Wang, T., & Clay, D. (2024). Entrepreneurial Aspirations of South Dakota Commodity Crop Producers. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.1043.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Abulbasher, A., Tong Wang and David Clay. 2024 "Entrepreneurial Aspirations of South Dakota Commodity Crop Producers" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.1043.v1
Abstract
A growing body of research has examined farmers' increasing economic challenges in the United States and the new models adopted to increase profit, remain in business, and achieve agricultural sustainability. However, the entrepreneurial strategies that western corn (Zea mays) belt farmers use to overcome economic challenges and achieve agricultural sustainability remain understudied. The model system used in this study was eastern South Dakota, and it examined the entrepreneurial aspirations of commodity crop producers using mail and online survey data collected in 2018. Using the diffusion of innovations framework, we investigated how innovation and entrepreneurialism spread among farmers, whether frequent training, building, and using social networks were essential to farmers' business success, and how age, education level, and farm size relate to their entrepreneurial aspirations. We analyzed these three socio-demographic characteristics of farmers against their adoption of entrepreneurship and engagement in networking and training. Our results show that: 1) farmers are looking for ways to adopt entrepreneurship; 2) education and farm size were positively related to the adoption of entrepreneurship; 3) age was negatively related to farmers' adoption of entrepreneurship, and 4) larger farm size is associated with farmers' use of social networks and participation in training. This study emphasizes the need to train farmers, equip them with entrepreneurial skills, maximize their utilization of social networks and opportunities, and encourage them to adopt strategic planning and best management practices.
Keywords
crop producers; entrepreneurship; South Dakota farmers; training; social networks
Subject
Social Sciences, Sociology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
