We study the existence of positive solutions for the semipositone biharmonic equation with Navier boundary conditions P \(\begin{aligned} \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \Delta ^2 u=\lambda f(t,u),~~\ \ \ & t\in \Omega ,\\[2ex] u=\Delta u=0,~~\ \ \ & t\in \partial \Omega , \end{array} \right. \end{aligned}\) where \(\Omega \subset \mathbb {R}^n (n\ge 1)\) is a smooth bounded domain, \(\lambda >0\) and \(f:\Omega \times \mathbb {R^+}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) is a continuous function with \(f(t,0)<0\) in \(\Omega \) , \(\mathbb {R^+}=[0,\infty )\) . We obtain existence results for positive solutions of problem (P) under different growth conditions. The proofs of the main results are based on bifurcation theory and degree theory combined with a rescaling argument.