Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise.[1] 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.
Pre-20th century history
Mexico
Under the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it each day. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.
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 ejidos: communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government.
Iroquois and Huron of North America
The Huron had an essentially
Collectivization under state socialism
The Soviet Union introduced collective farming in its constituent republics between 1927 and 1933. The Baltic states and most of the Eastern Bloc (except Poland) adopted collective farming after World War II, with the accession of communist regimes to power. In Asia (People's Republic of China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam) the adoption of collective farming was also driven by communist government policies.
Soviet Union
Leon Trotsky and the opposition bloc had originally advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.[3] According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Joseph Stalin appropriated the position of the left opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.[4]
Other collective farming
Europe
In the European Union, cooperative farming, farmers own their land privately, farms are independent family businesses and cooperation happens mainly in:processing, marketing, exporting and purchasing inputs; is fairly common and agricultural cooperatives hold a 40% market share among the 27 member states. In the Netherlands, cooperative agriculture holds a market share of approximately 70%, second only to Finland.[47] In France, cooperative agriculture represents 40% of the national food industry's production and nearly 90 Billion € in gross revenue, covering one out of three food brands in the country.[48][49]
There are also intentional communities which practice collective agriculture.[50]
In popular culture
In the 2021 Telugu film Sreekaram, the main protagonist encourages people for a community farming.
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 Trotskyist 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-Stalinist 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 kulaks.
See also
External links
References
- Definition of collective farm in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.^
- The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes Oxford University Press, 1981^
- Tom Kemp. Industrialisation in the Non-Western World Routledge, 14 January 2014^