Addressing the challenges of agro-cattle farming in Bangladesh: A study on educated youth entrepreneurs

Agro-cattle farming remains central to Bangladesh's rural economy, yet its potential for employment generation and value creation is constrained by intersecting institutional, climatic, and market barriers. Amid persistent youth unemployment, agro-entrepreneurship has emerged as a contested pathway for sustainable rural livelihoods. This study examines how educated youth entrepreneurs engage with agro-cattle farming and analyzes the challenges and adaptive strategies shaping enterprise sustainability and growth. Based on 22 semi-structured interviews with educated youth agro-cattle entrepreneurs, the study employs thematic analysis informed by the Theory of Planned Behavior and Institutional Theory to examine how entrepreneurial intentions interact with structural conditions. The findings reveal a set of mutually reinforcing constraints, including high input costs, limited access to veterinary and financial services, fragmented landholdings, social stigma surrounding farming, weak market integration, and climate-related risks such as flooding and salinity intrusion. Rather than isolated solutions, the analysis identifies a small number of high-leverage pathways - most notably climate-smart feeding practices, blended tele-veterinary services, and cooperative-based market integration - that enable youth to partially mitigate these constraints. Theoretically, the study contributes to rural studies by demonstrating how youth entrepreneurial intentions are institutionally embedded and systematically disrupted by rural structural conditions, generating a persistent intention–action gap. By conceptualizing educated youth as liminal rural actors navigating agrarian change, the study advances understanding of youth transitions, institutional embeddedness, and rural livelihood diversification in emerging economies.