Agriculture
Agriculture was organized into a system of collective farms (kolkhozes) and state farms (sovkhozes). Organized on a large scale and highly mechanized, the Soviet Union was one of the world's leading producers of cereals, although bad harvests (as in 1972 and 1975) necessitated imports and slowed the economy. The 1976-1980 five-year plan shifted resources to agriculture, and 1978 saw a record harvest followed by another drop in overall production in 1979 and 1980 back to levels attained in 1975. Cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, and flax were also major crops.
However, despite immense land resources, extensive machinery and chemical industries, and a large rural work force, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive, hampered in many areas by the climate (only 10 percent of the Soviet Union's land was arable), and poor worker productivity since the collectivization in the 1930s. Lack of transport infrastructure also caused much waste.
A view of poor performance of Soviet collective farms is provided by two historians, M. Heller and A. Nekich ("Utopia in Power, History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to Present," Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1986). The authors report that in 1979, 28% of the Soviet agricultural production was from small plots of private citizens, which represented less than 1% of the cultivated land. So according to them, collective farms operated very inefficiently.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of The Soviet Union
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