Why were collective farms so bad at being farms?

No, it wasn’t. As always, you don’t read your own cites. Not that I’d recommend anyone actually clicking on your link, and I’d check your PC if I were you. This is what I get when attempting to load your link:

This is a known dangerous webpage. It is highly recommended that you do NOT visit this page.

In any event, all your quoted text says is that the five-year plans underperformed compared to what could have been achieved, not that they failed. You’ll notice there’s still that problem you have with the fact that the USSR went from an industrial basket case to an industrial powerhouse under Stalin’s five-year plans, enough so that it buried Germany in a mountain of industrial war materials. Rather hard to qualify that as a failure, which again, your cite doesn’t do.