Explaining the Obstacles to the Development of Agricultural Entrepreneurship from the Viewpoints of Agricultural Graduates in the Kohgiluyeh Region

Background: Today, one of the most important challenges in Iran is the unemployment crisis of university graduates, especially agricultural graduates.At the same time, the capacities of agricultural development and employment in it are significant and abundant.Therefore, taking into account the capacity of the agricultural sector in this country, the unemployment problem of agricultural graduates can be solved by promoting entrepreneurship.On the other hand, the development of entrepreneurship is faced with various and different challenges and obstacles, which are necessary to be identified and overcome.In this regard, it will be very important to identify and explain the obstacles to agricultural entrepreneurship.Therefore, the current research was conducted to investigate the views of agricultural graduates regarding the obstacles to the development of agricultural entrepreneurship in the Kohgiluyeh region.Methods: The statistical population of the present study was agricultural graduates living in the Kohgiluyeh region (Choram and Dehdasht counties) in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, who were members of the Agricultural Engineering and Natural Resources Organization of the province (N = 300).Among them, 140 people were determined as the sample size and selected by the simple random sampling method.The data collection tool was a questionnaire containing 47 items based on the literature review and a pilot study in the region in the form of seven dimensions, including market-economic, skill-individual, administrative-legal, inability to recognize opportunities, support barriers, management, and contextual and in the form of a fivepoint Likert scale from one (completely disagree) to five (completely agree).The content validity of the questionnaire was examined and revised using the opinions of subject experts at Yasouj University, the vice president of human resources development of the Jihad-e-Agricultural Organization of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, and top entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector.The reliability of the research instrument was assessed through a pilot study conducted in Basht County (outside the research community), where Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated for various challenges, resulting in values between 0.705 and 0.854.The data were collected, coded in SPSS23 software, and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical tests. Results:The obstacles and challenges of agricultural entrepreneurship in the Kohgiluyeh region can be divided into seven categories, which are economic and financial challenges, support obstacles, managerial obstacles, lack of opportunity recognition, contextual, individual-skill, and administrative-legal ranked first to seventh, respectively.In addition, a higher than standard average was obtained for economic and financial, personal-skill, administrative-legal, support barriers, failure to recognize opportunities, managerial, and contextual barriers, which shows the high agreement of the studied graduates despite the mentioned obstacles.Based on the results of the Mann-Whitney test, no significant difference was observed between women and men in the view of obstacles to entrepreneurship.However, the research results show a significant difference between the education levels of agricultural graduates and individual-skill barriers.In addition, no significant difference was observed between economic and financial barriers, support, managerial, contextual, administrative-legal barriers, lack of recognition of opportunities, and the education levels of agricultural graduates.Conclusion: Food security in the country under the conditions of drought, water scarcity, and cruel sanctions necessitates the development of entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector.Notably, the primary responsibility for fostering entrepreneurship in this sector lies with its