I wrote this analysis originally as a comment in this post to reply to this other comment. Feel free to discuss my analysis, I would love to get a richer outlook.
There's a lot of talk about Soviet agriculture being inefficient, and it's a partial truth stated as a fact when reality is a lot more nuanced:
By the 1970s, the USSR and the USA were producing comparable amounts of grain, around 200 million tonnes of grain per year depending on the harvest (USSR a bit less, USA a bit more). In the USA, this was produced by an agricultural workforce of some 3-4 million workers, or about 4% of the labour force. In the USSR, this production was carried out by 27 million workers, or 25% of the labour force, data according to the official statistical bureaus of both countries. When this is discussed in western literature, it's attributed to "chronic inefficiencies in the Soviet agriculture" without any further analysis, but the lack of analysis hides the truth:
Starting with the US: a very significant amount of the labor was unaccounted completely in the official statistics. In a family of 4, if the father worked the fields registered as an agricultor while his wife and children "helped" him, this was accounted only as one worker, where de-facto there were four workers. Additionally, a great share of the labor in US agriculture is performed by unregistered migrant workers who are paid under the table and don't count in official statistics.
In contrast, the kolkhoz agricultural system in the USSR of collective agrarian ownership counted as employees all workers not only in the fields, but also workers such as cooks feeding the workers (unpaid female labor in the US by contrast), mechanics fixing the machinery (instead of outsourcing the process to urban factories), accountants... So how do we solve this accounting difference problem which seems so insurmountable? We could, for example, compare the total rural population in both countries, since rural life revolves around agriculture, especially so in the last century.
The evolution of rural population in the USA and the USSR is as follows: from 1920 to 1970, the percentage of rural dwellers in the USA went from 49% to 26%; in the USSR it went from 82% to 38%. This already showcases the largest difference: the Soviet agriculture was still developing due to the later industrialization of the USA, and it was doing it QUICK, whereas by the 1970s the USA's rural population had already stabilized as a result of earlier industrialization. Additionally, this figure portrays how the difference in total agrarian labor wasn't as large, not a tenfold factor (mostly artificial due to comparison with entirely different accounting systems) but more like a 50% larger rural workforce in the USSR compared to the USA. Now, let's examine this difference:
First and foremost, a huge factor is climate. The climate in the grain-growing steppes of the former USSR is much more unreliable, with shorter growing seasons, colder weather, and a larger variability in rainfall compared to the temperate grain-growing regions of the USA. Agricultural production varied much more wildly and unpredictably on a year-to-year basis in the USSR, which in the former Russian empire had led to massive famines which the Soviet society forever eliminated after the 1930s.
Likely the other largest factor is the availability of services in rural areas. In the USSR, rural areas had incomparable access to healthcare, education, arts, culture and entertainment compared to the USA. Anyone who knows anything about US rural regions knows it's essentially devoid of any form of any of those services, whereas rural Soviets enjoyed access to them.
(example of an abandoned Dom Kultury)
For reference, in modern Russia they are constantly closing polyclinics, maternity wards, schools, and there is literally none of the entertainment or culture left, and my girlfriend tells me how in the village where she comes from, now the closest hospital is above an hour away by car where they used to have a polyclinic and maternity ward in the neighboring rural centre. It is simply incomprehensible to people like me from the capitalist west to imagine a rural life rich in arts, healthcare, education, culture, sports and entertainment. Practically every town with above a few thousand inhabitants had a "Дом культуры" (dom kultury, culture house) vibrant with poetry clubs, art classes, theater companies... Children also could enjoy an immense amount of positive activities by belonging to the communist youths of the pioneers and the komsomol, so they weren't isolated in their homes as American children are (even in cities). Which brings me to the last point:
Since rural life in the USSR wasn't utter garbage, people didn't have such strong incentives to move to cities by the 1970s when the USSR had almost fully industrialized. When you were guaranteed your job at the kolkhoz with a decent wage regardless of crops that year, you had land to yourself to grow your own food, you had entertainment, art, culture and sports, and your children had education, fun activities, friends and healthcare, people could (and did) just stay in villages in the USSR. Farmers could work 8h and go to the dom kultur or to spend the evening with their children, unlike petit-bourgeois farmers in the west who simultaneously say it's the hardest job in the world (they do work 12h a day 7 days a week very often), while simultaneously taking that as something to be proud of and not as them exploiting themselves for a bigger wage next year.
So yeah, did the USian agricultural worker produce more grain per year, and did a hectare of USian soil produce more grain per year, when compared to the USSR? Yes. Is this simply to be taken as a random fact proving the inefficiencies of Soviet economy? Absolutely fucking not, and I'd 1000% rather have lived as a Soviet agricultural worker in the 1970s than as a Yank landowner.
Edit:
Source for Rural population over time:
Source for amount of agricultural workers:
Source for number of dom kultury:
(latter two tables machine-translated)
