In agricultural production, collective farming or cooperative farming and communal farming are the types of production in which the ownerships of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise. This type of collective is essentially an agricultural production cooperative in which members-owners engage or participates jointly in farming activities.
In this type of farming, group of farmers or households pool land, domestic animals, and agricultural implements, etc. under some private property members requirements. The profits are divided among the members of the farming land. In cooperative farming, farmers retain private ownership of the land.
Simply a collective farm is an agricultural production unit including a number of farm households or villages working together under the control of the state.
Collective farming was first introduced in the USSR in 1917 where it became general after 1930. Stalin’s collectivization drive 1929-33 wrecked a flourishing agricultural system and alienated the Soviet peasants from the land, many people (millions) were left homeless and died. In some of the countries, this type of farming has failed almost everywhere it has been forced on farmers. But in Israel the kibbutz or collective farm has been very successful and practiced for the protection of the farmers. This country introduced to encourage cultivation by neighborhood groups to bring significant changes in the poor lives as well as to increase agricultural production by bringing fallow and cultivable waste land into agricultural use, and has significance as a food security measure.
Typical examples of collective farms are the kolkhozy that dominated Soviet agriculture between 1930 and 1991 and the Israeli kibbutzim. Both are collective farms based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labor and income in accordance with the theoretical principles of cooperative organizations.
