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

Abstract

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