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Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise.Definition of collective farm in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China and Vietnam) there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both (cooperative-run farms) and (state-run farms).
Following the Mexican Revolution, a new constitution in 1917 abolished any remnant of feudal-like rights hacienda owners had over common lands and offered the development of : communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government.
The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan. Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's. The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.
The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided into sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (providing to each according to their needs) as it was practical (ensuring that each person pay their taxes). Strips were periodically reallocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This reallocation was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the households' ability to pay their taxes.
As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (). At the same time, Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the (farmland owners). In what became known as dekulakization, defiant kulaks were executed or mass deported to Siberia by the Soviet Communist Party in order to implement the plan.
The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine. In 1932–1933, an estimated 11 million people, 3–7 million in Ukraine alone, Holodomor after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives. It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels.Richard Overy: Russia's War, 1997Eric Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes, 1994
Collectivization throughout the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of Russification of Moldovans into the Russian way of life. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in Transnistria, in Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow.
The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms. In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms on collective land was allowed in the range of .25-1 hectare. Private cattle ownership existed after 1935 but was severely restricted by decree in 1956.
On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."
In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.Nigel Swain, Collective Farms Which Work?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
The third and final phase forbade possession of land above for one family. This phase was carried out in April 1948, two months after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power by force. Farms started to be collectivized, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. The most common form of collectivization was agricultural cooperative (, JZD; , JRD). The collectivization was implemented in three stages (1949–1952, 1953–1956, 1956–1969) and officially ended with the 1960 implementation of the constitution establishing the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which made private ownership illegal.
Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated. Their productivity was low since they provided tiny salaries and no pensions, and they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common, and food became scarce. Seeing the massive outflow of people from agriculture into cities, the government started to massively subsidize the cooperatives in order to make the standard of living of farmers equal to that of city inhabitants; this was the long-term official policy of the government. Funds, machinery, and fertilizers were provided; young people from villages were forced to study agriculture; and students were regularly sent (involuntarily) to help in cooperatives.
Subsidies and constant pressure destroyed the remaining private farmers; only a handful of them remained after the 1960s. The lifestyle of villagers had eventually reached the level of cities, and village poverty was eliminated. Czechoslovakia was again able to produce enough food for its citizens. The price of this success was a huge waste of resources because the cooperatives had no incentive to improve efficiency. Every piece of land was cultivated regardless of the expense involved, and the soil became heavily polluted with chemicals. Also, the intensive use of heavy machinery damaged topsoil. Furthermore, the cooperatives were infamous for over-employment.
In the late 1970s, the economy of Czechoslovakia entered into stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller.
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).
During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives ( chuji nongye hezuoshe). In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative.
By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives ( gaoji nongye hezuoshe), a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy. In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals. Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks. At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds. The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state. The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult members of a household, and partly at a standard rate by age and sex. These cooperatives also lent small amounts of land back to households individually on which the households could grow crops to consume directly or sell at market. Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, higher-level agricultural producers' collective were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China.
During The Great Leap Forward, the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party rapidly convert the Chinese economy to a socialist society through rapid industrialization and large scale collectivization.[1] Later, the country was hit by massive floods and droughts. This, combined with the usage of severely flawed policies of Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaign, caused "The Great Chinese Famine of 1959," where nearly 30 million people died of hunger. The party officially blamed floods and droughts for the famine; however, it was clear to the party members at the party meetings that famine was caused mostly by their own policies.Sue Williams "China: A Century of Revolution. Part 2", 1994 Recent studies also demonstrate that it was career incentives within the politburo system as well as political radicalism that led to the great famine.Kung, James Kai-Sing, and Shuo Chen. "The tragedy of the nomenklatura: Career incentives and political radicalism during China's Great Leap famine". American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (2011): 27-45.
Collectivization of land via the commune system facilitated China's rapid industrialization through the state's control of food production and procurement. (2025). 9789811852060, National University of Singapore Press. ISBN 9789811852060 This allowed the state to accelerate the process of capital accumulation, ultimately laying the successful foundation of physical and human capital for the economic growth of China's reform and opening up. During the early and middle 1950s, collectivization was an important factor in the major change in Chinese agriculture during that period, the dramatic increase in irrigated land. For example, collectivization was a factor that contributed to the introduction of Double-cropping in the south, a labor-intensive process which greatly increased agricultural yields.
Both land reform movement and collectivization largely left in place the social systems in the ethnic minority group areas of Chinese Central Asia and Zomia. These areas generally underwent collectivization in the form of agricultural producers' cooperatives during winter of 1957 through 1958, having skipped the small peasant landholder stage that had followed land reform elsewhere in China. Central Tibet was under the joint administration of the People's Liberation Army and the Dalai Lama's theocracy until 1959, and consequently did not experience land reform or collectivization until 1960 in agricultural areas and 1966 in pastoral areas.
After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping reformed the collective farming method. From this time, nearly all Chinese crops began to blossom, not just grain. The reform included the removal of land from rich land owners for use of agricultural land for peasants, but not ownership. This policy increased production and helped reverse the effects of The Great Leap Forward. The two main reasons why China succeeded was because 1) the government chose to make gradual changes, which kept the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party and 2) because the reform process began from the bottom and later expanded to the top. Throughout the reform process, the Communist Party reacted positively to the bottom-up reform initiatives that emerged from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping described the reform process as "fording the river by feeling for the stones". This statement refers to the Chinese people who called for the reforms they wanted by "placing the stones at his feet" and he would then just approve the reforms the people wanted. The peasants started their own "household responsibility system" apart from the government. After Chinese trade was privately deemed successful, all Deng had to do was approve its legalization. This increased competition between farmers domestically and internationally, meaning the low wage working class began to be known worldwide, increasing the Chinese FDI.
A 2017 study found that Chinese peasants slaughtered massive numbers of draft animals as a response to collectivization, as this would allow them to keep the meat and hide, and not transfer the draft animals to the collectives. The study estimates that "the animal loss during the movement was 12 to 15 percent, or 7.4-9.5 million dead. Grain output dropped by 7 percent due to lower animal inputs and lower productivity."
Following the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, South Vietnam briefly came under the authority of a Provisional Revolutionary Government, a puppet state under military occupation by North Vietnam, before being officially reunified with the North under Communist rule as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976. Upon taking control, the Vietnamese communists banned other political parties, arrested suspects believed to have collaborated with the United States and embarked on a mass campaign of collectivization of farms and factories. Private land ownership was "transformed" to subsume under State and collective ownership. Reconstruction of the war-ravaged country was slow and serious humanitarian and economic problems confronted the communist regime.
In an historic shift in 1986, the Communist Party of Vietnam implemented free-market reforms known as Doi Moi]] ( Renovation). With the authority of the state remaining unchallenged, private enterprise, deregulation and foreign investment were encouraged. Land ownership nonetheless is the sole prerogative of the state. The economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment. However, the power of the Communist Party of Vietnam over all organs of government remains firm, preventing full land ownership. Conflicts between the state and private farmers over land rights have grown with the potential to spark social and political instability.
Despite the reforms however, over 50% of all farms in Vietnam remain collective cooperatives (over 15,000 farming cooperatives in Vietnam), and almost all farmers being members of some kind of cooperative. The state also heavily encourages collective cooperative farming over private farming.Archived at Ghostarchive and the
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Another type of agricultural production cooperative in Cuba is UBPC – Unidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). The law authorizing the creation of UBPCs was passed on 20 September 1993. It has been used to transform many state farms into UBPCs, similar to the transformation of Russian (state farms) into (collective farms) since 1992. The law granted indefinite usufruct to the workers of the UBPC in line with its goal of linking the workers to the land. It established material incentives for increased production by tying workers' earnings to the overall production of the UBPC, and increased managerial autonomy and workers' participation in the management of the workplace.
There are also intentional communities which practice collective agriculture.Longo MaiCamphill movement There is a growing number of community supported agriculture initiatives, some of which operate under consumer/worker governance, that could be considered collective farms.
A lesser-known type of collective farm in Israel is moshav shitufi (lit. collective settlement), where production and services are managed collectively, as in a kibbutz, but consumption decisions are left to individual households. In terms of cooperative organization, moshav shitufi is distinct from the much more common moshav (or moshav ovdim), essentially a village-level service cooperative, not a collective farm.
In 2006 there were 40 moshavim shitufi'im in Israel, compared with 267 kibbutzim. Statistical Abstract of Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem, 2007.
Collective farming in Israel differs from collectivism in communist states in that it is voluntary. However, including moshavim, various forms of collective farming have traditionally been and remain the primary agricultural model, as there are only a small number of completely private farms in Israel outside of the moshavim.
Until recently Western Canada had a centralised wheat board where farmers were usually obligated to sell their wheat to the province which sold the product at a high collective price. Ontario currently has a milk board which obliges most milk producers to sell their milk to the province at a regulated quality and price.
A movement of voluntary collective farming started in 2008 in the Research Triangle under the name of crop mob. The idea spread throughout the United States and less than 10 years later this particular type of incidental, spontaneous, social-media driven collective farming was reported in over 70 places.
The 1929 Soviet film The General Line features Martha and a group of peasants organizing a kolkhoz. The film began production as a promotion of the Trotskyism Left Opposition viewpoint on collectivization. After the rise of Joseph Stalin and expulsion of his rival Leon Trotsky, it was heavily re-edited into the pro-Stalinism film The Old and the New.
The 1930 Soviet Ukrainian film Earth features a peasant encouraging his village in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to embrace collectivization, which they do after he is killed by .
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