Rural Entrepreneurship Policy in Estonia

This article seeks to provide an overview of the entrepreneurship policies targeted at rural areas and family undertakings. Agricultural undertakings, especially cattle breeders, have been almost ignored in the development of Estonia’s entrepreneurship policies. Various action plans have been devised for the development of rural living environments. Unfortunately none of them supports cattle breeding. The author obtained the data used in this research from the databases of Estonian Animal Recording Centre, Estonian Agricultural Register and from questionnaires. The author conducted interviews with beef cattle breeders doing performance testing and with parish authorities. Family enterprises are extremely vulnerable; their reserves for surviving critical periods are small or nearly nonexistent. They often depend only on one area of activity. In the current economic situation owners of family enterprises need to pay particular attention to strategic management, so as to survive in difficult situations. They must take right decisions and start looking for challenges