Khrushchev’s main policies to improve Soviet agriculture?

Question by christagmyer: What were Khrushchev’s main policies to improve Soviet agriculture?
Also With what results in the short term and long term

Answers and Views:

Answer by Spellbound
Khrushchev’s main agricultural reforms were:
Collective farms were paid more for grain and taxes on peasants were lowered and the amount of grain requisitioned was reduced therefore more was left for farms to sell.

And, to improve the farms efficiency:
Many collective farms were combined, creating massive farms. And the Machine tractor stations were disbanded and the tractors were sold to state farms. The MTSs were regional centres that held all of the agricultural machinery. In theory they were meant to be centres of expertise where the farm managers would call on to hire the tractors and combines for ploughing and harvesting. What happened was they created a bottleneck as all the farms in an area wanted to use the machines at the same time.

Other agricultural reforms:
The Virgin Lands Scheme.
Millions of acres of Kazakh, Altay (Siberian) steppe was put under the plough for the first time. This created bumper harvests for the first few years. But, poor soil management, lack of fertilisers and lack of protection from the high winds caused the crops to begin to fail and the scheme was abandoned in the early 1960s.

Splitting the party into industrial and agricultural wings.
Khrushchev hoped that splitting the party would produce agricultural experts within the party who would transform Soviet farming and make it efficient, productive and able to produce surpluses to sell abroad – it didn’t work, all it did was create resentment and inefficiencies.
See:
Khrushchev : The Man and His Era by William Taubman

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