# Why were collective farms so bad at being farms? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 5, 2023, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136 "2023-12-05T14:22:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/41 "2023-12-05T17:29:30Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Yet that is exactly what happened. Except, it didn’t there were plenty of uprisings because of collectivisation and the famines caused by it. But the communist regimes had a strong enough security apparatus by that point that none of them succeeded in overthrowing the government. But we only know that with hindsight. There is no evidence that they famines were an intended consequence of collectivization. Apart from other evidence, if that was the case why was there such an effort from innumerable underlings at all levels to keep the realities of the famines and failures of collectivization from the dictator. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/42 "2023-12-05T17:44:14Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > The idea that causing a massive famine would help a dictator stay in power was (and is) ridiculous. On the contrary, it works quite well if your goal is redistribution of fertile farmland from the ethnic underclass to people who are more willing to play ball. You have to understand that the USSR was never about instituting a Communist utopia. Their goal was Russian ethnic dominance over as much of Europe and Asia as they could grab. Ukranians were always their greatest enemy because they want no part of Russia, but they sit on land that Russia feels is their breadbasket. Russia wants all Ukranians assimilated or dead, it’s as simple as that. This is the reason for the Holodomor, it’s the reason Russia invaded in 2022, it’s the reason Russia has been trying to stamp out Ukranian identity since before Peter the Great. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/43 "2023-12-05T17:46:01Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > As far as whether Stalin intended to kill off the Kulaks, I guess you could argue that he confiscated their entire agricultural product, leaving them nothing to eat, and then they coincidentally died. But that suffers a certain lack of explanatory power. Of course he intended to kill them off. But there is no evidence the whole program of collectivisation was initiated by Stalin to delibrately cause famines that he could then use as an excuse to kill off the Kulaks. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/44 "2023-12-05T17:58:01Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > But there is no evidence the whole program of collectivisation was initiated by Stalin to delibrately cause famines that he could then use as an excuse to kill off the Kulaks. That was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment. Stalin’s attitude is best characterized is “they can help the collective or die.” But the broader point is that it’s a mischaracterization to suggest these famines were a failure of collective farming. By all accounts, agricultural production was adequate to feed the population, but the Communist Party simply decided not to do that. It’s debatable whether collective farming is as productive as other forms of farming. But when the government confiscates the product and trades it away for automobiles, machinery, and factories, that’s not a failure of collective farming, it’s something else. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/45 "2023-12-05T18:04:23Z")
The Bolsheviks had started to move away from “All power to the Soviets” and “Any cook can govern” and toward “One man management of industry” and “Taylorism” by 1918, so yes, controlled, centralized economy, “collectivized,” well, that is something different, as you note. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/46 "2023-12-05T18:06:11Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Can you point out any time that forced collectivization of any industry was successful? It won’t be anything that demonstrates your point because the concept as practiced was inherently flawed. I just did right. The other areas of Soviet industry ( iron, steel, guns, tanks, nuclear power plants, ICBMs, etc. ) were inefficient but they worked. The relative success of the soviet union (in terms of winning WW2 against the Germans, and holding their own in the cold war) demonstrates that fact. Also its also a matter of timing, the soviet union did not start being a brutal authoritarian regime, where the government didn’t care about its citizens, in the later 1920s and 1930s. But they did start the mass collectivizing agriculture, and that resulted in massive famine. And the main point here is its _not_ just the Soviet union. Every single communist state that attempted mass collectivization of agriculture resulted in massive failures of the agricultural system, and usually widespread deadly famine. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/47 "2023-12-05T18:13:34Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > I just did right. The other areas of Soviet industry ( iron, steel, guns, tanks, nuclear power plants, ICBMs, etc. ) were inefficient but they worked. The relative success of the soviet union (in terms of winning WW2 against the Germans, and holding their own in the cold war) demonstrates that fact. Was it successful? How many materials and finished products like trucks did the United States provide the Soviet Union during WWII? ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/48 "2023-12-05T18:15:05Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > But the broader point is that it’s a mischaracterization to suggest these famines were a failure of collective farming. By all accounts, agricultural production was adequate to feed the population, but the Communist Party simply decided not to do that. Even if that was the case (Its extremely hard to say because of the aforementioned widespread fabrication of numbers to ensure no one had to tell the supreme leader that collectivization was a failure) , that doesn’t make it not a spectacular failure. Its clear output was lower post-collectivization than before the revolution (when Russia was by no means a perfect example of well run modern agriculture), A successful modern agricultural system (or a even non-catastrophic one) should be able to handily feed everyone living in the countryside, and have excess left over to feed city dwellers and for exports ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/49 "2023-12-05T18:20:25Z")
> [@Dorjan](#): > > Communist regimes often implemented agricultural policies based on ideological principles rather than practical agricultural science. This. They didn’t put people in charge of the decisions who knew how to farm. They put people in charge of the decisions who met political standards. In addition: knowing how to farm in any specific place is a local skill. Some of the knowledge works over wide areas, or even almost anywhere; but a lot of it is dependent on soils and climate, including microclimate and very local soil deposits; and/or dependent on local pollinators or the lack of, local beneficials (mammalian, avian, insect/spider, wide variety of soil life) or the lack of, and so on. Trying to impose the same techniques on everybody may work for factories producing cars or tanks. Doesn’t work at all for farming. . > [@Kropotkin](#): > > Part of the failure was due to the government using agricultural products to create funds for investment in other sectors, such as industry. Also a factor. When crops were successfully raised, the people raising them often didn’t get to keep enough of them for their own needs. And the emphasis on exportable crops also led to insufficient diets as other crops necessary for nutrition weren’t grown, and to eventual production problems due to lack of crop rotation. And Stalin, of course, was deliberately starving farmers out; he didn’t want relatively independent people potentially challenging his authority. > [@Kropotkin](#): > > Russian peasants before the revolution often managed the resources collectively, divvying up land through discussions and debates to ensure a rough equality over time. Yeah. Quite a lot of ancient agricultural systems did something of the sort. These were local collectives, making decisions based on what had actually worked in that particular place in previous years. > [@msmith537](#): > > I don’t think there is anything specific about structuring a farm around a collective that would make it unsuccessful. But it sort of presumes the members of the collective actually know how to farm and aren’t just a bunch of peasants being told to increase grain yields at gunpoint. Or, worse, a bunch of city people being told the same. The peasants probably do have some idea how to farm. > [@chappachula](#): > > The Hutterites and the Israeli kibbutz movement are collectives, but have one absolutely vital difference ,compared to the communist collectives : > they are purely voluntary. > > When people actively choose to live a certain lifestyle and form their own commune, ( and live under a government which respects their choice), they work hard and succeed. > > When people are forced into communes and treated as slaves, not so much. Also very much a factor. > [@griffin1977](#): > > that is what modern agricultural systems are meant to do, and had successfully done in the West for centuries. You produce enough to feed the people working on the farms Farmers living in the Midwest on some of the most fertile land on the planet have at times had to resort to living on food stamps – because they were growing only grain. Generally they weren’t even equipped to process that, but bought their bread, cereal, and flour at the store – but even if they still had the equipment to process their harvest, you can’t stay alive on grains alone. > [@griffin1977](#): > > This was considered the nadir for agricultural production in the modern US. But at no point was the US close to not being able to feed its people There were certainly lots of people in the US in the 1930’s who didn’t have enough to eat. Death rates went up due to malnutrition. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/50 "2023-12-05T18:21:39Z")
> [@Odesio](#): > > Was it successful? How many materials and finished products like trucks did the United States provide the Soviet Union during WWII? Lots (my favorite fact is most of the soviet tanks at the battle of Moscow were Britsh) but while important they never made up more than a small minority of the total war materials used by the red army. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/51 "2023-12-05T18:25:13Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > A successful modern agricultural system (or a even non-catastrophic one) should be able to handily feed everyone living in the countryside, and have excess left over to feed city dwellers and for exports By “successful modern,” we often mean “producing a surplus beyond the needs of the primary producers.” Peasant farming was/is mostly about feeding the local community, and rearranging it to produce a market economy with a surplus that goes to tsars, commissars, landlords, or capitalists usually means “somebody’s gonna get hurt.” The stories of the enclosures and clearances and famines in England, Scotland, and Ireland are examples. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/52 "2023-12-05T18:32:03Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > The stories of the enclosures and clearances and famines in England, Scotland, and Ireland are examples. Yeah but you had to go back at least century before you saw that in a European country, and that was an outlier caused by British colonial policies. Most of those examples you mention were hundreds of years in the past at the time of collectivization ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/53 "2023-12-05T18:49:08Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > On the contrary, it works quite well if your goal is redistribution of fertile farmland from the ethnic underclass to people who are more willing to play ball. Except there was also plenty of famine in the Russian bits the Soviet Union too. Again there is no historical consensus the Holomor was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Ukrainians. That to me says all about collectivization: it’s not possible to definitively say if this notorious mass killing was actually a genocide or just collectivization working as usual. And again this was just one example in one communist country. None of those factors apply to Maos great famine or North Koreas. There is no ethnic factor at play there, but there is collectivization ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/54 "2023-12-05T18:49:54Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > I mean Stalin’s Soviet Union managed to win an industrialized war with Germany, and then went on to hold their own (even pull ahead at times) in the cold war arms race with the US. The Soviet Union was **always** ahead of the US in the arms race during the Cold War. There wasn’t a single year from 1946-91 that the USSR wasn’t outproducing the US in military hardware. The only categories it was behind in was initially in nuclear weapons production since they didn’t get the bomb until 1949, and in large surface combatants throughout the Cold War, as the USSR had no need to project power overseas. They did, however, outproduce the US greatly in both small coastal combatants and submarines, which are effective at what the Soviets needed their navy to do, that being sea denial. > [@griffin1977](#): > > The relative success of the soviet union (in terms of winning WW2 against the Germans, and holding their own in the cold war) demonstrates that fact. It wasn’t relative, it was absolute. In 1939 the Soviet Union didn’t just have more tank (~20,000) than any other single nation, _they had more tanks than every other nation on the planet combined_. That the Soviet military performed so poorly both in the Winter War with Finland in 1939-40 and the German invasion in Barbarossa in 1941 wasn’t the result of any material shortcomings; it was largely the result of Stalin’s purging of the officer corps in the late 1930s. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/55 "2023-12-05T18:57:29Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Let’s not forget that agriculture failed in the US and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s when world grain prices crashed. Many farmers had negative incomes for years and many abandoned farming: a lot of the “hoboes” riding the rails were former farmers. And they didn’t even count as “unemployed.” The droughts and dust bowls didn’t help, but those too owed much to the market farm economy. The problem was that mechanization was steadily decreasing the number of people needed to farm the land, and increasing the size farm necessary to be economical. Quite simply, large numbers of former farmers had to go broke and end up finding non-agricultural work for the system to reach equilibrium. But going from being an independent farmer who owned his own land, however hardscrabble, to being a factory employee was a hard blow for people used to their independence. The agricultural depression of the '20s and '30s was millions of marginal farmers holding out to the last gasp before going under. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/56 "2023-12-05T18:58:01Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > A successful modern agricultural system (or a even non-catastrophic one) should be able to handily feed everyone living in the countryside, and have excess left over to feed city dwellers and for exports What would you say about an agricultural system that managed to mobilize and feed the biggest army the world has ever seen, to defeat the second-biggest army the world has ever seen, and go onto be a superpower with a space program and nuclear program for the next half century? Do you think that sounds like a country that can’t feed itself? Or more like a country that just has no qualms about starving people when the ruling party finds it convenient to do so? ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/57 "2023-12-05T18:59:50Z")
There are multiple reasons why large collectives fail. The ones that succeed tend to be small enough that interpersonal relationships and reputation can be social controls. The related concept here is ‘Dunbar’s Number’, the number of social relationships that can be maintained coherently in the human brain. Dunbar noticed that Hutterite colonies tend to split when they get larger than about 150 people, and many other collective organizations have organizational limits around that number. People argue over the exact size of the number, but it’s definitely under 500, and probably closer to 150-250. It all comes down to incentives and information. Below Dunbar’s number, people are incentivized by social forces - approval, shunning, attractrion of potential mates, etc. Powerful tools of social control. For this to work, goals also have to be aligned which is why so many successful collectives are small and religious in nature. As the size of a collective grows, the cost of social grooming to maintain order goes up. Above Dunbar’s number, social pressure starts to fail and you need bureaucracy, laws, whatever. Increasingly, decisions get made by bureaucrats instead of the people closest to the problems, The cost of social control rises beyond reasonable, and things break down. > **[Dunbar's number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)** > > Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. > This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he pro... Another huge factor is _tacit knowledge_. We always underestimate the importance of local knowledge and experience. We make the same mistake here with managerialism. In the Soviet Union, people who had generations of specialist knowledge of best practces for farming their specific areas were thrown off the land in favor of ‘educated’ party apparachiks who would bring ‘modern Soviet Science’ to agriculture, but who had never actually run any kind of farm and didn’t understand the local farming environments and their needs. Again, we make this mistake everywhere from government to large business, trading local decision-making by peoole closest to the problems with central planning and decisions by remote managers and ‘experts’. It’s just that capitalism is robust enough to work around the damage caused by such foolishness. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/58 "2023-12-05T19:01:15Z")
> [@Crane](#): > > The soviets were peoples’ committees run from the bottom up. Moscow was out of the picture. That wasn’t communism, that was anarchism. (Only slightly tongue-in-cheek; that was more or less Lenin’s view of bottom-up communism.) ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/59 "2023-12-05T19:05:46Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > > [@griffin1977](#): > > > > This was considered the nadir for agricultural production in the modern US. But at no point was the US close to not being able to feed its people > > There were certainly lots of people in the US in the 1930’s who didn’t have enough to eat. Death rates went up due to malnutrition But that wasn’t due to the non-existence of food, or even skyrocketing food prices- commodity prices were never lower. Rather the unemployed in the cities simply didn’t have enough money to eat properly. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2023, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136/60 "2023-12-05T19:13:14Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > But that wasn’t due to the non-existence of food, or even skyrocketing food prices- commodity prices were never lower. Rather the unemployed in the cities simply didn’t have enough money to eat properly. If the Soviet Union hadn’t been exporting food, they’d have had a lot more to eat at home, also. Though they’d still have had the failures due to putting the wrong people in charge of the farms for political reasons, which I also went into in that post. I was noting separately that what the USA had was a different type of failure, definitely not caused by collectivization. People driven off their homesteads for lack of cash then wound up in cities, without access to land on which they could have grown, gathered, and hunted their food (which in the early 1900’s a lot of them still knew how to do.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-collective-farms-so-bad-at-being-farms/994136.md?page=4)