L’imprenditore agricolo : prospettive di riforma tra diritti fondamentali, doveri ecologici e transizione digitale

The present study examines the contemporary figure of the agricultural entrepreneur as a normative paradigm situated at the intersection of private autonomy, public regulation, and technological transformation. It argues that the agri-entrepreneur model— the customary conception of which is set down in Article 2135 of the Italian Civil Code—can no longer be understood as merely defining the pertinent professional sector but must be regarded as a systemic hinge within the European legal order, reconciling productive efficiency with the constitutional and supranational imperatives of sustainability, responsibility, and digitalisation. This analysis situates the agricultural entrepreneur’s evolution within the broader transformation of European private law, where traditional categories of ownership, contract, and enterprise are being redefined through the integration of ecological and technological principles; as such, agricultural enterprise, far from being a residual or declining form of economic activity, serves as a laboratory for the future of legislation. Within such activity, parties’ freedom of enterprise is subject to their environmental and social responsibilities, while the dialectic between public regulation and private autonomy becomes instrumental to governance. This study therefore adopts a systemic and constitutional methodology that combines historical reconstruction, civil-law dogmatics, and interpretative tools embedded in European Union law. It engages with both the agricultural sector’s historical roots and its contemporary regulatory frameworks, showing how evolving legislation mirrors the transformations of the productive and technological environment to which it applies. An enduring tension persists between the codified definition of agricultural enterprise—grounded in the material element of production—and its functional evolution as steered by the European Union. Together with the European Green Deal and the Farm-to-Fork Strategy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) no longer conceives agriculture as a merely productive sector but as a constitutional function oriented toward sustainability, food security, and territorial cohesion. In this normative context, the agricultural entrepreneur becomes the central actor in a process of juridical re-functionalisation: from producer of goods to guarantor of ecological balance and social welfare. Such enterprise thus embodies an institutional structure that mediates between private economic initiative and the public objectives of environmental protection and rural development. Within this framework, agricultural exceptionalism (specialità agricola) is reinterpreted not as a privilege or derogation but as a locus of normative synthesis, where market rationality, environmental constraint, and the constitutional value of labour converge. The notion’s evolution within the civil-law tradition, and duly through European integration, shows how agricultural exceptionalism has been reshaped into a principle of governance. What was once a functional distinction between agricultural and commercial enterprise has thus become a structural distinction between productive models, reflecting contrasting legal and ethical imperatives. The agricultural entrepreneur is therefore not a marginal remnant of pre-industrial law but living evidence of the law’s ability to adapt its categories to changing economic and social functions. This study’s methodological approach rests on two complementary axes. The first is vertical, examining the dialogue between national private law and the supranational legal order. The agricultural entrepreneur serves as a case study in national systems’ ability to internalise EU principles—proportionality, precaution, sustainability—without losing their legislative identity. This vertical analysis reveals how the relationship between national constitutions and European Treaties reshapes the very notion of economic freedom, grounding it in environmental responsibility and social inclusion. The second axis is horizontal, comparing adjacent legal domains such as food law, environmental law, and competition law. This cross-sectoral perspective highlights the permeability of ostensibly rigid boundaries and allows an integrated vision of the agri-food system, whereby production, distribution, and consumption are borne out as stages of a single normative process. Each of the study’s five chapters addresses a distinct level of transformation. Chapter 1 revisits the civil-law foundations of Article 2135, analysing the relationship between agricultural and commercial enterprise and reaffirming agricultural activity’s distinct character as the deciding factor in its legal-dogmatic interpretation. The same chapter reconstructs the debate on the ‘crisis’ of the agricultural entrepreneur, showing that the crisis is interpretative rather than structural. Chapter 2 adopts a constitutional perspective. It explores the interplay between Articles 41 and 42 of the Italian Constitution and the principles of environmental protection, health, and the dignity of labour. Here the agricultural entrepreneur emerges as a constitutional subject both constrained and legitimised by the pursuit of collective benefit. Chapter II also addresses the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Treaties (Articles 38–44 TFEU), charting the shift of emphasis from productivity to sustainability. It shows how the constitutionalisation of agriculture represents a process of juridical adaptation to ecological limits, where the protection of the environment becomes both a restriction and an extension of entrepreneurial freedom. Chapter 3 examines the regulatory transition introduced by the European Green Deal and the new 2023–2027 CAP. An analysis of key Regulations (EU 2021/2115, 2116, 2117) demonstrates how the Union’s framework transforms sustainability into an operative legal principle that permeates contracts, labelling, market organisation, and risk management. Certification and traceability systems are not mere channels of communication, serve as mechanisms of accountability and transparency; legal design within the CAP has evolved from serving a distributive logic to facilitating conditionality-based governance, under which access to benefits depends on measurable environmental and social outcomes. Chapter 4 investigates agri-entrepreneurship’s organisational dimension, focusing on mechanisms of collective representation and risk governance: producer organisations, interbranch agreements, and prohibitions on unfair trading practices (Directive 2019/633; Legislative Decree 198/2021). By such measures the EU legislator positions social equity as a functional condition of market efficiency, thereby overcoming the antinomy between competition and solidarity. In this sense, the regulation of the agri-food chain becomes a laboratory for rethinking antitrust principles in light of sustainability objectives, illustrating how the law integrates distributive justice into market logic. Chapter 5 explores the digital transition of the agri-food sector. Drawing on the EU Data Act (regulation 2023/2854), the 2024 AI Act, and emerging infrastructures such as blockchain, IoT, and smart contracts, it argues that digitalisation does not neutralise legal categories but reshapes them. The agricultural entrepreneur becomes a data manager, the farm a node within a distributed informational ecosystem. Law must therefore ensure that algorithmic rationality remains compatible with human responsibility and the constitutional principles of predictability and accountability. Digital agriculture represents a new phase of legal evolution, in which data and algorithms function as regulatory devices embedded within the economic process itself. All five chapters share a core thesis: that the agricultural entrepreneur, once regarded as a marginal figure, now constitutes a normative paradigm reconciling efficiency and equity. Agri-entrepreneurship embodies a model of regulated autonomy in which private initiative is not curtailed but oriented toward the common good. Dissolving the traditional dichotomies of public/private, market/environment, and production/responsibility, this approach instead proposes a relational model of governance. This research contributes to the renewal of European private law by proposing an interpretative model in which sustainability functions as a systemic principle, comparable in scope to good faith or fairness. In this light, legal interpretation itself presupposes the exercise of ecological responsibility, ensuring that sustainability operates not only as an external policy goal but as an internal criterion of coherence within the legal system. Moreover, this study offers a conceptual framework for understanding digital transformation not as disruption but as a continuation of the law’s inherent rationalisation process. From this perspective, technology is not the negation of decision-making but its procedural extension—a new form of normativity that requires juridical control. The agricultural entrepreneur therefore serves as a benchmark by which the law can measure its own adaptability to innovation and risk. Standing at the intersection of constitutional law, European integration, and technological governance, the figure of the agricultural entrepreneur lends credence to the notion that that the future of agricultural—and, more broadly, private—law depends on the establishment of a theory of responsibility at once ecological, social, and digital. By integrating sustainability and digitalisation into the very structure of entrepreneurial freedom, the agricultural sector becomes a testing ground for the constitutionalisation of the economy. In exploring these questions, this research redefines the relationship between law and development: not as a confrontation between growth and its limits but as a co-evolutionary process in which legal norms steer innovation while preserving the continuity of human agency. In this sense, the agricultural entrepreneur is not simply a market actor but a custodian of legal rationality in a transitional era, embodying the ongoing dialogue between nature, technology, and law. By retracing the evolution of agricultural law from its early codifications to the digital era, this study ultimately reflects on how legal rationality adapts to economic and technological transformation while preserving its normative coherence.