The fall and fall of Soviet agriculture or why small is sometimes beautiful

In chapter 4 of his recent book “Was Communism Doomed?: Human Nature, Psychology and the Communist Economy" psychologist Simon Kemp outlines the mostly sorry tale of Soviet agriculture. He sums the Soviet experience up by saying,

Overall, Soviet agriculture was not a great success story.

The question raised by this is, Why?

Kemp gives his answer is chapter 8 of his book on “Psychological Ownership”. Kemp notes that agriculture does not require a large organisation. Kemp writes,

Economies of scale are not always important in agriculture. When Stalin initiated the brutal collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, he appears to have done so with the genuine belief that in the long run the larger units would prove more productive. As we have seen, this increase in productivity did not happen [see chapter 4 of Kemp's book]. In part, this is because agriculture does not always benefit from concentrated large-scale production.

Owner-operator (family) farms are still in most countries, including New Zealand, the standard organisation for agricultural production. Why this is so is a question relevant for why collective farms failed. After all collective farms were designed more along large scale industry lines than small scale family lines.

The short economic answer to this question is, I would argue, given by Allen and Lueck (1998). They argue that farms operate in unique circumstances defined by nature, in particular seasonality. This is the main feature that distinguishes farm organisation from industrial organisation. For farmers a season is a distinct period of the year during which a given activity is optimally undertaken.

This is key to understanding the why the incentives generated within agriculture favour family farms. The two basic issues are opportunities for hired workers to shirk due to random production shocks from nature and the limits on the gains from specialisation and the timing problems caused by seasonality. The trade-off between effect work incentives and gains from specialisation help determine the costs and benefits of different farm organisational types.

The family farm model provides the best work incentives since the owner is the sole recipient of the benefits, but this model misses some benefits due to specialisation. This follows from the fact that the farmer must engage in numerous different tasks during each stage of production, and in addition, numerous production stages throughout the year.

On the other hand, large factory-style corporate farms gain from a specialised labour force and lower cost of capital, but suffer from bad worker incentives since hired workers, not being one of the owners, have an increased incentive to shirk.

To some degree all firms are governed by the trade-off between gains from specialisation and work incentives. For the case of farming it is the unique, large impact of nature that biases it towards family operations.

An obvious, but key, feature of agriculture is that it involves a living, growing product. In the case of livestock, for example, you have breeding, husbandry, feeding and slaughter. Such a cycle is largely governed by nature. In principle there is no reason that a different farmer could not own each stage. But timing difficulties between stages result in high costs of engaging in market transactions. Such timing issues are particularly severe in farming because the inventories of the intermediate goods cannot be held given the living nature of the product.

There are a number of factors, such as the number of crop cycles, the length of the production stages and the number of tasks within a stage, which also influence wage labour incentives. When cycles are few, stages are short, random shocks are large and the tasks are few, there is little to gain from specialisation and labour is especially costly to monitor. Thus family farms.

If these issues can be overcome, that is, if farmers can mitigate seasonality and random shocks to output, farm organisation starts to look much like that in the rest of the economy. Under such conditions farm organisation will gravitate towards factory process and develop the large-scale corporate forms of other sectors of the economy. So larger more industrial looking farms may work.

But right now, small it seems really is beautiful.

Ref.:

• Allen, Douglas W. and Dean Lueck (1998). "The Nature of the Farm", Journal of Law and Economics, 41: 343-86.