Farm Mechanization on the Grand Scale
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THE extent to which agriculture in the U.S.S.R. has gone over to collective farming can be gauged from the fact that in 1938 there mere some 243,300 such farms in existence and in them were united nearly 19,000,000 peasant households. From that it is fair to say that practically 95 per cent. of the whole of Russian farming is on the collective system.
This method lends itself admirably to increased mechanization and, whereas in 1910 the peasants had 10,000,000 wooden ploughs and 17,000,000 wooden harrows in use, machine and tractor stations in 1938 employed 483,500 tractors with a total of 9,256,200 h.p. They also used 153,500 combine harvesters and hundreds of thousands of other implements, in addition to 195,800 road transport vehicles. Altogether there were 6,350 machine and tractor stations in the Soviet Union; this was a remarkable growth from 1930, when only 158 stations existed. In 1938 no fewer than 50,000 women were working as tractor drivers and combine-harvester operators. Only 2.3 per cent. of the area under grain was harvested by other means than combines.
Such widespread mechanization has involved the need for much technical training, and a whole chain of schools has been organized for this purpose, many of them located on the State farms. Between 1931 and 1937 schools under the Peoples' Commissariat of State Farms trained 200,000 tractor drivers, 52,000 combine operators, 25,000 assistants and 6,000 mechanics. New records for speed and efficiency are constantly being achieved, notable among them being the efforts of tractordriver Belenko„who ploughed 5,965 acres in a season, and tractor-driver Kostenko, who covered 6,538 acres. Two tractor drivers, Kopytko and Kovtun, of the Gigant State Farm, sowed 642 acres a day with six seed drills towed by a crawler tractor.
This is part of the story told in the recently published "Agriculture and Transport," one of the volumes in the "U.S.S.R. Speaks for Itself" series. Each volume comprises a number of articles, all written by Soviet specialists in the various subjects.
Whilst a very great number of road vehicles is used in the U.S.S.R., the railways are, obviously, the backbone of the present transport organization. It is apparent that very great improvements have been made in the system, and the aggregate mileage is now 52,700, as compared with 36,300 miles in 1913. At the same time, freight density has been greatly increased. In 1913 the ton-miles of traffic figure per mile of line in operation was 689,000, but in 1936 it had risen to 2,416,000. Germany's figure for 1936 was 722,000 and that of Great Britain, 514,000. The volume also deals with Soviet achievements in connection with shipping and inland waterways.