Abstract: It is crucial to stimulate farmers' endogenous motivation and improve their entrepreneurial performance in order to promote rural economic and social development. From the perspective of individual psychological characteristics, this paper constructs the relationship model between farmers' proactive personality and entrepreneurial performance,collects the data from 541 entrepreneurial farmers in 6 provinces, and conducts a test on the model with the ordinary least squares and the asymmetric confidence interval method based on bootstrapping. The results show that the proactive personality has a significant positive impact on farmers' entrepreneurial performance, and that the proactive personality has a significant positive impact on the exploitative innovation behaviors and the exploratory innovation behaviors of the entrepreneurial farmers. It is found through further intervening mechanism analysis that the proactive personality can affect the entrepreneurial performance by taking advantage of the partial mediation of theexploitative innovation behaviors and the exploratory innovation behaviors. The mediating effect of the exploitative innovation between the proactive personality and the entrepreneurial performance is stronger than that of the exploratory innovation. In theory, the results of this study expand the understanding of the factors affecting farmers' entrepreneurial performance and enrich the researches of the grassroots innovation. In practice, it is suggested that the cultivation of proactive personality should be included in farmer training projects, and farmers' innovation should be emphasized and supported, so as to promote the high-quality development of farmers' entrepreneurship.

Key words: proactive personality, exploitative innovation, exploratory innovation, entrepreneurial performance