ABSTRACT
Soviet agriculture has always proved difficult to plan. One reason is that over most of the main belt of arable land both temperature and precipitation are characterised by variations from year to year, with greatly reduced yields in dry years, and sowing and harvesting affected by late spring and early autumn frosts. Organisational problems, partly selfinflicted by the system of state and collective farms, have resulted from bad management and a lack of incentives to individual farmers. The quality and general shortage of facilities for the harvesting, storage and marketing of agricultural products have been blamed in many Soviet sources, often with amusing frankness in the Soviet journal Krokodil (see Box 7.3).
