Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise.Definition of collective farm in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. Two broad types of communal farms exist: 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.

Early modern North America

The Wendat had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals, noting the Wendat had "as much land as they need[ed]." As a result, the Wendat system could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally. Any Wendat was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. They maintained possession of the land as long as they continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields. Once they abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. While the Wendat did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance; the placement of corn storage vessels in longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common.

The Haudenosaunee had a similar communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan. Land property was really only the concern of the women, since cultivating food was the women's job and not the men's. The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.

Russian Empire The obshchina (, literally: "commune") or mir (, literally: "society" (one of the meanings)) or Selskoye obshestvo ( ("Rural community", official term in the 19th and 20th century) were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy (common).

The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided into sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (providing to each according to their needs) as it was practical (ensuring that each person pay their taxes). Strips were periodically reallocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This reallocation was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the households' ability to pay their taxes.

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. 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. Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky of voluntary collectivisation differed from the policy of forced collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928, due to the levels of brutality associated with the latter’s enforcement.

As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy). At the same time, Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks (farmland owners). In what became known as dekulakization, defiant kulaks were executed or mass deported to Siberia by the Soviet Communist Party in order to implement the plan.

The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine. In 1932–1933, it is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people, about half of whom were Ukrainian, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives. It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels.Richard Overy: Russia's War, 1997Eric Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes, 1994

Collectivization throughout the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of Russification of Moldavians into the Russian way of life. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in Transnistria, in Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow.

The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms. In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms on collective land was allowed in the range of .25-1 hectare. Private cattle ownership existed after 1935 but was severely restricted by decree in 1956.

Romania

In Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual completion in 1962.A. Sarris and D. Gavrilescu, "Restructuring of farms and agricultural systems in Romania", in: J. Swinnen, A. Buckwell, and E. Mathijs, eds., Agricultural Privatisation, Land Reform and Farm Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 1997. Force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. These attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contradictions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable."Kligman, G., & Verdery, K. (2011). Peasants under siege: the collectivization of Romanian agriculture, 1949–1962. Princeton University Press.

On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."

Bulgaria Collective farms in the People's Republic of Bulgaria, introduced in 1945, were called Labour Cooperative Agricultural Farm ().

Hungary

In Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted several times between 1948 and 1956, with disastrous results, until it was finally successful in the early 1960s under János Kádár. The first serious attempt at collectivization based on Stalinist agricultural policy was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. By the early 1950s, only one-quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives.Iván T. Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.Nigel Swain, Collective Farms Which Work?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Czechoslovakia

In Czechoslovakia, centralized land reforms after World War I allowed for the distribution of most of the land to peasants and the poor, and created large groups of relatively well-to-do farmers (though village poor still existed). These groups showed no support for communist ideals. In 1945, immediately after World War II, new land reform started with the new socialist government. The first phase involved a confiscation of properties of Germans, Hungarians, and collaborators with the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called Beneš decrees. The second phase, promulgated by so-called Ďuriš's laws (after the Communist Minister of Agriculture), in fact meant a complete revision of the pre-war land reform and tried to reduce maximal private property to of agricultural land and of any land.