Неизвестное сельское хозяйство, или Зачем нужна корова?

100 3.1 Socio-demographic resources

106 3.2 Land resources

115 3.3 Inputs into the people’s sector from large farms

124 3.4 Non-agricultural environmental resources

132 3.5 The geographical resource base

Chapter 4. Geographical Differentiation

in the character of People’s Farming 145 4.1 Volume and productivity

161 4.2 For themselves or for sale

174 4.3 The Ethnic mosaic of Individual farming

Chapter 5. The Varied Character of Private Farming

195 5.1 Gastarbeiter on plantations

202 5.2 Multifaceted private farmers

214 5.3 The shoots of private entrepreneurship

219 5.4 Urban dwellers’agriculture

231 5.5 The variability of private farming in Russia

235 5.6 Small-scale farming and land conflicts

Chapter 6. Socio-economic changes in rural Russia

246 6.1 Problems in privatefarming in Russia

256 6.2 The informal economy and the self-organisation of farming in rural districts 266 6.3 Changes in the socio-economic structure of rural society

274 6–4 The private sector informer and existing socialist countries:

East-Central Europe – Russia – China

285 6.5 Social and economic policy in rural Russia

296 Conclusion. What next?

305 References

317 Summary

Summary

The book «Russia’s unknown agriculture or The need to own a cow» is written by two geographers, Dr Tatyana Nefedova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Dr Judith Pallot of Oxford University, UK. Its subject is a little studied aspect of Russian agriculture. Much is known about large and medium-scale agricultural enterprises – they are the subject of political debate at national and local level and statistics are collected relating to them. However, large and medium-scale farms are responsible for less than one half the value of agricultural produce in Russia. Private “peasant” farms about which there has been so much discussion among politicians and in the press are responsible for only 4 per cent. The majority of food in Russia is, in fact, produced by the people in their spare time, including all their days off and holidays, on small plots of land. Urban dwellers produce more than their rural counterparts. In order to illuminate this shadowy aspect of the agrarian economy, the authors visited many regions of Russia interviewing the producers themselves, the managers of large farms and local authority officials, and analysed the available published and unpublished data. The methodology they employed is discussed in the introductory chapter to the book. In this same chapter the authors give a detailed review of the history Russian private agriculture in the twentieth century, including of the phases and results of agrarian reforms of the 1990s. The chapter describes the current multifaceted structure of Russian agriculture and the role of “people’s farms” in the agrofood production system 1 and in the household economy of the producers.

The second chapter is devoted to specific examples of how “ordinary people” in Russia’s regions carry out farming on heir plots. The aim of the chapter, using both word pictures and photographs, is to demonstrate the rich variety of people’s farming (personal subsidiary farming) in different rural districts in regions with different physical-geographic conditions: the South (using the example of Stavropol krai and the Volga provinces), the North (1n the Pre-Urals and Archangel oblast), the suburbs and in Russia’s glubinka. The last section of the chapter describes places that, it turns out, can be found “anywhere” in Russia but not “everywhere”. These are special places where people’s farming has assumed a commercial and specialised character that place it on a par with other clusters of entrepreneurial activity in post-Soviet Russia.