راهبردهای کارآفرینی در کشاورزی (Jul 2024)
Explaining the Outcomes of Green Entrepreneurship Establishment in the Greenhouse Production System of Golestan Province
Abstract
Extended Abstract Background: The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and pollution. These challenges are serious threats to human welfare, economic development, and social stability. To face these challenges, there is a need for innovative solutions, such as green entrepreneurship, which can create positive environmental and social effects and economic value. Along with sustainable socioeconomic development, therefore, green entrepreneurship helps save the environment from destruction by maintaining the potential of the ecosystem, adaptation to climate change, water resource management, agricultural value chain improvement, the development of multi-functional agriculture, and the health of society. Greenhouses can present an alternative to transform and maintain a commercial and sustainable business over time. The growing number of greenhouse production systems has increased environmental concerns regarding energy consumption related to temperature control (heating/cooling), water resource management, excessive use of fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals. Green entrepreneurship in a greenhouse helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, grants environmental sustainability, and increases productivity by creating green economy opportunities. Paying attention to greenhouse cultivation and its development is one of the best strategies to change the cultivation pattern from traditional to scientific in arid and semi-arid provinces of Iran with limited water resources, including Golestan province. This region plays an important role in increasing production, employment, income, and productivity in water consumption and provides sustainable food security and water security. The development of greenhouse cultivation systems is necessary in Golestan province for continuous cultivation with environmental considerations, its superiority of the dry and semi-arid climate due to the increase in temperature, the dependence of agriculture on dry farming, the limitation of water resources, the decrease of rainfall, and the need to save and change cultivation. This research mainly aims to investigate the achievements that are realized through the establishment of green entrepreneurship in line with sustainability considerations in the production units of vegetable greenhouses. Methods: The current research is an applied and descriptive study in terms of the objective data collection method, respectively, as well as inferential research with a variance matrix analysis and cross-sectional in terms of time. The statistical population of the study includes all the vegetable greenhouse producers in Golestan province, among which about 70 people were selected by total population sampling. The data collection tool was a questionnaire that was completed in the field through interviews. Its internal reliability was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability. The validity (face and content) of the questionnaire was confirmed based on the collective opinion of entrepreneurship and environmental experts and university faculty members. The convergent and discriminant validity of the model were respectively confirmed using the extracted mean variance index and the Fornell and Larcker matrix. Data were analyzed with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on the partial least squares method using Smart PLS version 3.0 software. Results: This research mainly aimed to categorize the explanatory components of the green entrepreneurship establishment from the viewpoints of vegetable and summer greenhouse owners with the CFA method in Golestan province. The green entrepreneurship achievements were identified using two groups of obvious and hidden variables. In total, achievement indicators with 18 items and 6 components were entered into CFA. According to the research, the achievements of the green entrepreneurship establishment to achieve the sustainable development of rural entrepreneurship were investigated in three economic, social, and environmental dimensions. The main components of the green entrepreneurship achievements based on the path coefficient (in brackets), respectively, include six components. (1) Promoting community health and safety behavior (0.833), (2) participation and empowerment of agriculture (0.814), (3) consumer satisfaction and trust (0.632), (4) product market guarantee (0.553), (5) competitiveness in the market (0.442), and (6) promoting green operations management (0.370). Conclusion: Green entrepreneurship is a type of entrepreneurship with innovation, which helps improve the life quality of communities by following the principles of sustainable development and preserving the environment and optimal consumption to utilize creative opportunities for economic benefits in society. To achieve this goal, it is necessary that green entrepreneurship contribute to the context of education and promotion with cultural creation and media advertising in the field of healthy domestic product brands for culture-building and awareness of green products and to increase the demand for green products. Moreover, institutional and government support should be provided by subsidizing healthy production inputs, such as organic pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and subsidizing irrigation equipment (e.g., drip irrigation), soil testing, and chemical pesticide residues, to encourage farmers to produce green crops. Accordingly, coordination of different public and private sectors, development of local networking, promotion of local women and youth employment, support of green product production cooperatives, promotion of healthy crop insurance, and access to the electronic market for buying and selling green products can be synergistically and effectively help in achieving economic, social, and environmental sustainable development achievements of green entrepreneurship.
