ONE VAST FARM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 52, Issue 3767, 10 June 1936, Page 7

ONE VAST FARM

THE RUSSIAN SCHEME. THIS YEAR’S SOWING. In no department of its vast economic planning under-a dictatorship does the Soviet State show itself more completely the master than in agriculture, the last field which it socialised, writes Harold Denny from Moscow ;o 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 sowing advances northward like a wave into the Ukraine 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 240,000,000,000 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, after discussions with farm 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 89,400,000, which will be far larger than any in the Soviet’s history. The law ordering this production makes no exceptions for untoward weather coditions. '

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. There is every confidence here that the ambitious goal will be realisedThe operation of the collective farms has been steadily improved. Mechanisation has been greatly 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 moisture-filled 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 with 57,000,000 last year. A lesser acreage will be sown to oats, with other grains trailing. Of the total grain area to be sown 69 acres must be sown with nurebred, 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 law order 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 agriculture.