When can a farmer be an entrepreneur? Taking entrepreneurship back to the future

This paper argues that agricultural entrepreneurship is a relatively unexplored area of inquiry inthe entrepreneurship research. One of the root causes for this inadequate research lies on the way the concepts of entrepreneur and entrepreneurship have been defined. Many widely used definitions imply 'creation of a new venture' as the basic condition to be an entrepreneur. Agriculture being the business of generational continuity, this connotation of entrepreneur unwittingly excludes establised farm from its membership. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine various definitions of entrepreneur or entrepreneurship to highlight their positions in this debate and identify core features (image) of today's entrepreneur and agriculture. It then proposes a definition of the concept that deconstructs the present popular notion of an entrepreneur to accommodate innovative farmers in the natural set of entrepreneurs. Restricting entrepreneurs to a creator of a 'new venture' undermines the development potential of agriculture. By offering a broad definition of an entrepreneur, this paper contributes to the expansion of the general theory of entrepreneurship into the farming sector. This will promote agriculture as the next frontier of entrepreneurship research and generate evidence-based policy recipe for the development of agripreneurship