ONE VAST FARM

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 May 1936, Page 9

ONE VAST FARM

THE RUSSIAN SCHEME

In no department of the vast economic planning under a dictatorship does the Soviet State show itself more completely the master (han in agriculture. tiie last field which it socialised, writes Harold Denny from Moscow to the “New York Times.’’ In agriculture, better perhaps than in anything else, this country is now demonstrating what Socialism in the Soviet sense really means.

This is especially apparent to-day as spring growing advances northward like a wave into the Ukraino-as fast as the fields dry from the melted snow. For this year for the first time the whole agricultural area of this Socialist domain is being administered like one great farm —a farm of 240.000,000 acres. .The Kremlin may be said to be the manor house of this plantation. Every detail of this year's agricultural programme, from the number of wagon loads of fertiliser (485,000,000) to the amount of the various crops which shall be produced, has been worked out by Government and party leaders, for every district of the country, and embodied in decrees. EXTENT OF THE ORDER The amount of grain ordered produced, incidentally is 104,000,000 metric tons, as compared with last year’s crop of 89,000,000, which will be far larger than any in the Soviet’s history. The law ordering this production makes no exception for untoward weather conditions.

Government, party, and farm executives, says a recent Kremlin decree, “are warned that their work will be judged by results—in increasing the yield of crops." Executives all the way down the line, from heads of autonomous republics to managers of individual farms, are expressly forbidden to alter the requirements as to the total crops to be produced or the amount of deliveries to be made to the State, all of which have been worked out with infinite detail. i There is every confidence here that the ambitious goal will be realised. The operation of the collective farms has been steadily improved. Mechanisation has been gradually extended. Agronomists know their jobs better. The peasants themselves are more contented than in the early years of collectivisation, when so many opposed it. Fairly heavy snows had fallen in most parts of the Soviet Union, assuring that planting will start with moisturefilled soil.

THE BIGGEST CROP The total area to be sown with grain this year is 158,000,000 acres in extent, compared with 155,000,000 acres last year. Of this 60,000,000 acres will be devoted to wheat, compared w r ith 57.000,000 last year. N lesser acreage will be sown to oats, with other grains trailing. Of the total grain area to be sown, sixty-nine acres must be sown with pure-bred, tested seed. Special fields are to be set apart this year for growing such seed in sufficient quantity to supply the Soviet Union’s entire planting requirements next year. Other paragraphs of this year’s laworder the completing of .planting within a period of seven to twelve days, forbid aeroplane sowings, sowing on mud, and other errors of the past Thus, with demand by the Government and the party for specific increases in grain, cotton, sugar, beet, flax, sunflower, and potato crops—in other words, by the setting of definite norms—the Stakhanoff movement now is definitely applied to agri cu 11ure.