Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Behaviours in Small-Scale Dairy Farms in Turkey

Dairy farms are quite important to transform Turkish livestock sector into being more productive and competitive in the process of EU integration. The purpose of this study is to determine the socio economic features of dairy farms in Turkey and to determine producers’ individual and management goals in the future. In addition, farmers’ level of participation related to the attitudes, behaviors and subjective norm components are determined and an entrepreneurship index is constructed to determine the factors that influence social economic characteristics of entrepreneurship. The material of the study consists of 167 surveys obtained from Cattle Breeders Association of Turkey in 17 cities through the postal mail in 2007. A five “Likert Scale” was used to determine behaviors and attitudes of farmers as well as descriptive statistics. In each category, factor weights were calculated based on factor analyses. Then, the social economic factors that determine entrepreneurship index were estimated using “Logistic Regression”. The results indicate that the primary goals of farmers are high income, enjoying the job, better life conditions, earning respect, utilizing the resources, better image, and producing high quality products. When entrepreneurial behaviors and attitudes are examined it was found that most of the farmers aim at earning high profit as a main goal and value dairy milk farming. The logistic regression shows that the factors that determine entrepreneur index are age, experience and area of feed crops.