Taking into account the demand for agricultural products inside the country and abroad, the government assigned maximal delivery quotas and minimal delivery prices, which it regards as expenses that must be minimized. The main purpose of the collective farms in the Soviet economic system was to provide the state with the maximum cost-free capital for developing heavy industry, arming the military, and maintaining the bureaucracy. In 1979 the average collective farm owned 2,278 head of livestock, of which 719 were cows 1,516 hogs and 922 sheep and goats. By 1979 it reached 3,400 ha, while the number of collective-farm households on the average farm had reached 655. For the average collective farm, however, the land under seed increased rapidly. About 26 percent of the farming facilities were in the hands of state farms and the state.ĭuring the 1960s–1970s the number of collective farms continued to decrease gradually, but at a slower rate than before. In 1980 the area of the tilled land and farming facilities at the disposal of collective farms in Ukraine amounted to only 70 percent of the total tilled land and facilities in the Ukrainian SSR. Starting in the 1960s, some of the lands belonging to collective farms were transferred to interfarm enterprises and associations, which increased in number from 488 in 1965 to 1,537 in 1979. The land at the disposal of the farms was gradually reduced as the number of state farms and their farmland were increased: the number of state farms increased from 929 in 1940 to 2,104 in 1979. By 1958, 86.1 percent of the arable land was under their control. In 1938, after a decade of collective farming, 79.1 percent of the land in Ukraine was used by the collective farms. At that time an average collective farm had 2,660 ha of land and 289 households.
The policy of amalgamating collective farms, introduced in 1950, further reduced the number of farms to 13,192 by 1958. In the late 1940s many collective farms had very small areas of arable land: for example, 800 farms had less than 100 ha per farm, and almost 3,000 had less than 300 ha per farm.
Despite intensive collectivization in Western Ukraine at the end of the 1940s, the total number of collective farms fell to 23,653 owing to the merger of smaller farms. By 1939 there were 27,377 collective farms, the average farm having 1,285 ha at its disposal. Collectivization was achieved by the abolition of privately owned farms and the intervention of political and police agencies. In the Ukrainian SSR collective farms were introduced in 1928–33. Legally the collective farms were autonomous economic enterprises that functioned on the basis of their own statutes within a framework of administrative-legal and contractual relations with the state, other enterprises, and their own members.
This practice distinguished the collective farms from other forms of shared farming such as the commune, association for the joint cultivation of land, and state farm. Labor on the farms was collective, but the income was divided, either in kind or in money, among the members. Apart from the land, which belonged to the state, members of the collective farms owned their principal means of production in common, and these could not be divided among the members of the collective. Collective farms were called agricultural artels for some time. Collective farms were introduced by force during collectivization and existed side by side with state farms ( radhospy). From 1930 the type of farm that dominated farming in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
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