ABSTRACT
Some Soviet reformers consider the establishment of true family farming, independent of collective and state farms, in at least part of Soviet agriculture as a way of achieving genuinely private farming within an overall socialist setting. The positive interest that the Soviet leadership has been showing in "personal subsidiary farming" has, among other things, resulted in a considerable increase in public information on the private sector. In greater detail than ever before, the weight of the private sector's contribution to Soviet agriculture as a whole as well as its importance in the economy as a supplier of food for the population is revealed in official Soviet publications. Formerly, official Soviet statistics considered intra-farm sales to be part of socialist output. Some Union-republican data have recently been made available in the form of Soviet livestock units, which essentially are cattle units but are in a consistent form only for 1980, 1985, and 1987.
