Diversification and the Entrepreneurial Motivations of Farmers in Norway*

A series of significant pressures but also new opportunities face the agricultural sector in developed economies. Farm diversification is presented as a political solution and a viable business strategy and highlights the entrepreneurial side of farmers. This paper is a unique attempt to address the question of motivation for farm diversification using Norwegian data. The results demonstrate that social motivations are as important as economic motivations, that is, there are substantial differences in which motivations underpin different types of diversification. This suggests, first, that the literature could gain from engaging more in the variation of motivational drivers than general trends, and second, that farmers need different forms of support to develop their entrepreneurial skills. With a data set derived from a large survey (N = 1607) of Norwegian farm holdings, we use a multinomial logistic regression model to analyze how six farm diversification categories are differently influenced by different types of motivations and other background variables.