collective farm, an agricultural production unit including a number of farm households or villages working together under state control. The description of the collective farm has varied with time and place.

In the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union a policy of gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture was adopted in 1927 to encourage food production while freeing labor and capital for industrial development. In 1929, with only 4% of farms in collectives, Stalin ordered the confiscation of peasants' land, tools, and animals; the kolkhoz [Rus.,=collective farm] replaced the family farm. The state would decide how much of what crops were to be produced, how much would be paid to the peasants for their work, and how much would go to the state at what price. Farmers who resisted were persecuted, exiled, even killed.

By 1931, more than half of all farms had been collectivized. Low productivity and inordinate government diversion of farm production contributed to a devastating rural famine in 1932-33. Under the Collective Farm Charter (1935), individual farmers were permitted to keep small garden plots and a few animals for domestic use, and to sell surplus production in local free markets.

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was almost complete by 1938. Successive reforms reflected the persistence of problems associated with centrally planned economies. In 1950 the government began amalgamating collective farms. The number of kolkhozy, which had peaked at 254,000, was reduced to 32,300 by 1972, while the average size of collective farms roughly tripled to approximately 7,500 acres (3,000 hectares), and the average number of households per kolkhozy increased from 75 before World War II to 340 in 1960.

In 1958 new laws abolished the government's power to requisition farm products and substituted direct state purchases at higher prices. In 1969 the Collective Farmers' Congress increased the size of private plots and instituted income guarantees and social insurance. In the 1970s, as an incentive to increase production, collective farmers were assured profits on various commodities. By this time about half of the cultivated land in the Soviet Union was in collectives; most of the rest was in state farms. As the Soviet Union and its bloc of Eastern European satellites disintegrated in the early 1990s, the collective farm faced a difficult and uncertain transition to new forms of ownership and management. In 1992, 7,000 farms chose to remain state-owned, while 9,000 chose to privatize, registering themselves as companies. Through the 1990s, Russia was forced to increase state subsidies to its collective farms, due to high inflation and price increases in supplies and equipment. In 2003, with the passage of laws permitting the sale of farmland, the foundations were laid for further changes in Russian agriculture.

In China

The commune of China is more strictly organized than the Soviet collective farm, including a wider range of activities, putting greater emphasis on communal living and including nonagricultural workers. Collectivization of agriculture in China began in 1955; by 1956, 96% of all farming households were included in cooperatives. The system failed to free the labor and capital needed for industrial expansion, and in 1958 the commune system was established.

Twenty to thirty cooperatives comprising over 20,000 members and 40 to 100 villages were merged into each commune. The land and equipment of the former cooperatives and any property and cash still held by the peasants became the property of the commune. In each commune an economic and administrative unit controlled the labor force and all means of production, providing central management of industry, commerce, education, agriculture, and military affairs. Living communally, workers performed both industrial and agricultural tasks and supported a military unit. They used communal nurseries, bathing facilities, barbershops, and similar facilities. Wages and perquisites were controlled by the state, and all products were marketed through state agencies.

By 1959 virtually all Chinese farm workers were members of communes. The inefficiency and management problems of large collectives, coupled with natural disasters and government errors, led to reforms. In the early 1960s communes were decentralized; some were divided into private farms. In the late 1970s, after the death of Mao Zedong, individual households were granted long-term leases on their farms, paying a fixed amount of their production to the state and consuming or selling the rest. For the first time the farm household was also allowed to sublet land, recover capital investments, hire labor, own machinery, and make agricultural decisions.

In Israel

In Israel, collective farms pay nominal rents to the Jewish National Fund, which holds all land in the name of the people. Israeli collectives are based on three models. The kibbutz, the best known and most important economically, was inaugurated in 1909 as a purely agricultural collective. Light industry was added in the 1920s, and other types of businesses and tourism are now also important economically. In a traditional kibbutz, all property except specified personal possessions is collectively owned, planning and work are collective, and communal living is the rule. Work is assigned on the basis of ability; foremen are elected; and goods are distributed according to need. A town meeting governs; elected officials implement policy and administer economic and social affairs. Israel's couple hundred kibbutzim represent a wide range of political and social beliefs. Although only a small percentage of Israel's population have ever been members, the kibbutzim have wielded considerable political influence. Since the early 1980s, when the debt of kibbutzim soared, many have implemented some privatization measures, have hired rather than elected their managers, and have reduced other collective and communal elements of kibbutz life.

In the moshav ovdim, first established in 1921, each family owns its own house and leases and works its own land, retaining any income it earns. Hired labor is prohibited. Buying and selling are done collectively. In the moshav shitufi, a collective model developed in 1936, property is held communally and work is done collectively. Wealth and housing are private. Many moshav dwellers now hold nonfarming jobs in projects developed on the moshav or outside the village.

In North America

Communal farming has not been markedly popular in North America, although numerous attempts have been made (see communistic settlements). An exception is the agricultural communities of Hutterites (see Hutterian Brethren), who, as a result of persecution in central Europe, emigrated to South Dakota in 1874. They have increased in population and economic prominence to include (1999) some 36,000 members, living in over 430 colonies, mainly in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, Washington, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.

See also ejido.

Russian kolkhoz.

In the former Soviet Union, a cooperative agricultural enterprise operated on state-owned land. Under the policy of collectivization, which was pursued most intensively by Joseph Stalin in 1929–33, peasants were forced to give up their individual farms and join large collective farms. They objected violently and in many cases slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their equipment before joining. By 1936 almost all the peasantry had been collectivized, though millions had also been deported to prison camps. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990–91, the collective farms began to be privatized.

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The brigade was a labor division within the Soviet collective farm (kolkhoz).

The 1930s

The mass collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed the peasantry from individual household production into an archepeligo of collective farms. The question of internal organization was important in the new kolkhozes. The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, for working purposes. `By July 1929 it was already normal practice for the large kolkhoz of 200-400 households to be divided into temporary or permanent work units of 15-30 households.'

The authorities gradually came down in favour of the fixed, combined brigade, that is the brigade with its personnel, land, equipment and draught horses fixed to it for the whole period of agricultural operations, and taking responsibility for all relevant tasks during that period.

The brigade was headed by a brigade leader (brigadir). He was usually a local man (few were women).

Land allotment

The authorities resolved that each brigade was to have a fixed plot in every field of the crop rotation. A Communist Party resolution of 4 February 1932 said the brigade's land should be fixed for the agricultural year, but some kolkhozes found that it helped forward planning to fix it for the whole period of the crop-rotation, and this practice was formally adopted in the kolkhoz Model Statute of 1935. In the central Asian cotton-growing kolkhozes, each brigade might hold its land as an integral unit, its members living within this unit.

The kolkhoz "Krashcha Dolya" as an example

Krashcha Dolya was based on the village of Yurchenkovo (Kharkov oblast, Ukraine). It was a sugar-beet producer, and grew a variety of other crops (grains, pulses etc). The district's Machine Tractor Station was on the kolkhoz's land. Krashcha Dolya was cited as a kolkhoz learning from its errors, and an example for others to learn from. Up to 1933 it had had no crop-rotation. It was then decided to introduce a seven-year one. The kolkhoz's personnel were divided into seven brigades, and its land area into seven fields. The brigades were to receive equal ratios of the cultures grown in the kolkhoz, and to maintain these ratios for the period of the crop-rotation. If this were not the case the brigades' labour requirements (greatly different for grain and beet), and hence their membership and equipment, would fluctuate greatly from year to year. A careful distribution of cultures in the fields and laying-out of brigade plots was required to achieve harmony.

After some experimentation, the kolkhoz board decided to `take its marching orders' from the layout of sugar-beet. Beet was (to be) grown in a single field, a different one each year, and would occupy most of this field. Winter grain was grown on one side of this field. (Winter grain was also grown in some of the other fields.) Each field was divided into seven equal and parallel strips, running so that each would cut across the areas of beet and grain and have the same ratio of these crops. Each brigade was allotted one strip in every field, to hold for the duration of the crop-rotation. Three hundred and thirty hectares of beet were grown in the kolkhoz, and so with this arrangement every brigade would receive an equal 47 hectares. Each brigade had a beet-sowing machine, which could plant 6 hectares a day. Thus the brigades could carry out beet sowing simultaneously and finish it within 8 days. (Before this there had been 11 brigades, who could not then all work simultaneously with the kolkhoz's lesser number of beet-sowing machines.) The crops in the other fields were presumably so arranged that the brigades would receive equal ratios of them too.

Extent

Almost two-thirds of kolkhozes (65.1%) had two or more field brigades in 1937. (Presumably it was the smaller kolkhozes, in northern Russia and elsewhere, that were not divided into brigades.) Brigades varied in size from 20ij0 workers in the north, north-west and parts of the non-black-earth centre, to about 100 in the Lower and Middle Volga. The average, in 1937, was 62 people. A brigade in the black-earth had about 10 hectares of land per member; thus a brigade of 50, for example, had 500 hectares.

The kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950

After the kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950 the territorial successor of the old village kolkhoz was the "complex brigade" (brigade of brigades), a sub-unit of the new enlarged kolkhoz.

See also

• Zveno (Soviet collective farming)

Notes