Collective farming is basically the process by which individual land owners are forced to give up their land and assets (such as livestock) and give it to the state ran or organized "collectives" or "Communes" which in theory is a larger unit incorporating all nearby land/assets to achieve greater economy of scale and increase crop yields.

The problem with this is that first of all, people didn't like this process very much and often destroyed their assets (i.e slaughtered their livestock and ate it) rather than giving it up. Not only that, but collectives were pretty terrible at being efficient or giving incentives to its workers. If your the amount you are producing is going to the collective instead of yourself you have less incentive to produce, and when not enough food gets produced things are pretty bad.

That being said in -most- years collective farms aren't -that- bad and at least produce enough so that most people don't go hungry (and when they don't the government imports grain from US/Canada), mass starvation occurred mostly when farmers slaughtered their livestock in resisting collectivization (USSR in the 1930s) or someone makes a bunch of very stupid policies (Great Leap Forward in China).

Some countries (i.e Hungary) did a significant better job at collectivizing than the Soviets or Chinese, and Collective farms does make it easier for economic planners to manage since they combine many smaller farms into one big one, and it's easier to planners to manage 10,000 large farms than 10,000,000 smaller ones. It's a pretty useful tool to cement Communist rule over the countryside.

It's a big question on which many books have been written. To narrow the scope slightly I'm going to focus on collective farming in 1) the Soviet context (to 1953) and 2) the actual farms rather than collectivisation. I'll also try to be relatively concise and keep the stats to a minimum. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of the below.

To provide some context, the predominant form of farming in Russia was traditionally communal. In this commune (obshchina) structure the land was owned/managed by the village committee while each peasant household was allocated strips of land to farm as individual producers. This form of farming had become even more prevalent since the Revolution, with the eradication of the large estates of the nobility. By 1927 some 95% of arable land in the RSFSR was held in common ownership by village communes. (Note: this is not collective farming.)

Communes posed a few problems for the Soviet government. The most obvious was the such primitive peasant agriculture was supposed, probably correctly, to be relatively inefficient. It not only limited agricultural production but also constrained the amount of grain, the staple crop, reaching the urban markets. The abolition of the large estates had, ironically for a workers' revolution, strengthened the peasantry in the urban/rural balance of trade. That is, the cost at which the urban economy had to sell manufactured goods to the countryside to procure grain. The NEP years saw a long and acrimonious debate amongst the Bolshevik leadership as to how best feed the cities while not diverting too much capital from their primary concern, industrialisation.

All of which came to a head with the emergence of the Stalinist hyper-industrialists and the grain crisis of 1928. It was decided to cut the Gordian knot by restructuring the agricultural base so as to 1) increase the amount of marketable grain reaching the cities, 2) increase agricultural production via modernisation/mechanisation and 3) achieve all this on the cheap, essentially forcing the peasantry to pay a 'tribute' that would help finance industrialisation. All this was to be achieved by abandoning the market mechanisms of the NEP and resorting to 'administrative measures'.

It was at this point that collective farms enter the picture. These had long been seen by the Bolsheviks as a preferred socialist alternative to the peasant communes but there had been little investment in them since 1917. There were a few variants of these, which I'll go into in a minute, but the key common economic features were that:

• Commune strip farming was abolished and land amalgamated into large single plots, as per European/American practice. This would allow for increased use of mechanised equipment and, in theory, increased production.

• Farming was done on a collective, rather than individual, basis. In the USSR this took the form of 'brigades' of peasants working the fields together. Output was pooled and belonged to the collective farm itself (who would sell it to state agencies for cash).

• Machinery was owned by the state and rented out to the farm in the form of a Machine Tractor Station (MTS). This would provide the farms with machinery and, in theory, the necessary technical expertise to run this.

• While farming was collective, each peasant household was permitted an individual plot to farm for their own benefit. The produce of these could be sold on the market. These were by some distance the most productive parts of the collective farm.

(There was also of course the political advantage that collectivisation entailed the abolition of the obshchina, a genuine peasant institution, and its replacement with a more reliable collective farm management. State control over the peasantry was thus extended.)

As I said, from 1917 a few different types of collective farms emerged. The two that came to dominate were the kolkhoz and the sovkhoz. The difference between them being:

• Sovkhozy were the ideologically preferred choice of the Bolsheviks. These were farms in which everything was owned by the state and the peasants received regular day wages. In effect they turned peasants into agricultural workers (a 'rural proletariat'), as was happening in the West. Indeed, the early ones had their roots in abandoned noble estates taken over by the state post-revolution.

• While sovkhozy were initially favoured (and became so again in the post-Stalin period) kolkhozy became the mainstay of the collectivisation drive. By 1937 there were some 243,000 of the latter in existence, compared to 3,992 sovkhozy. The key difference between the two is that the kolkhoz's labourers did not receive a flat wage. Instead they remained peasant producers who sold their output quota to the state (at fixed cost) and then divided the remainder amongst themselves (based on labour days worked).

The reason that Stalin favoured the latter was that it shifted the burden of production onto the farm and away from the state. In a sovkhoz, the wages of which came from the state's budget, then workers were paid regardless of the harvest or the state's quotas. In contrast, those working on a kolkhoz had no guarantee of a minimum return after the state had taken its cut of the farm's output. Poor harvest? Then it was the peasants who would feel the pain first. Again: this was to be agricultural restructuring on the cheap, intending (but arguably failing) to finance the urban economy.

Safe to say that all the above varied and it took years for a standard kolkhoz structure to emerge. I won't go into the details of the broader collectivisation drive itself, except to say that it was a disastrous and entirely chaotic endeavour. There are a few factors behind the catastrophe collapse of agricultural production in the early 1930s but the haphazard and rushed nature of collectivisation was unquestionably amongst them. It took years for grain production to recover from the shock of collectivisation; livestock numbers alone didn't reach 1927 levels until the 1950s.

Sources

As I say, it's a huge topic so these are more starting points than anything else. I always recommend Alec Nove's Economic History of the USSR as an introductory work on the Soviet economy. For the years in question, Carr and Davies provide more in-depth review in their magnificent, if old, Foundations of a Planned Economy (Vol 1).

Also from Davies, who's probably the leading expert on Soviet agriculture during the period, is The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, The Soviet Collective Farm 1929–1930 and The Years of Hunger. These are dense economic works but yet, IMO, yet to be bettered when it comes to a forensic examination of the Stalinist economy.