Collective Agriculture

Collective agriculture is the practice of several farm households or villages working together in a food production system, often under state control. Collective agriculture is often associated with Communist economies—such as the former economies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the former Soviet Union—in which collectivization was historically compulsory and imposed. The theory behind agricultural collectivization in the former Soviet Union was to replace small, unmechanized, inefficient farms with larger-scale, mechanized farms that would produce food more efficiently, and to free poor peasant workers from oppression by wealthy farmers. After the lukewarm response to voluntary participation in collectives in the late 1920s, Stalin imposed collectivization during the 1930s by seizing millions of acres of privately owned land and setting up a system of state-controlled agricultural collectives called ...