During the cold war keeping people happy was very important for both sides. It was said that "when the people from one side start supporting the other, the war is lost". This connects to agriculture in the cold war as food is a resource that 40% of the soviet union didn't have which meant that a lot of people were starving and angry at the powers for letting it happen. To resolve this the soviet union tried 3 different techniques. The first was sending a representative (Nikita Khrushchev) to the United states to see how they were farming. The second was to pay people to have farms. The third one was to hire experts from abroad. I will be focusing on the USSR as the United States didn't have many issues with their agriculture at this time.
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Sending a RepresentativeThe first attempt at solving the issue was sending out Nikita Khrushchev to the US to see how their farming system worked. In the US farming is a private industry and it is done by businesses, individuals and is not run by the government. This did not work for the Soviet union as most people could not afford to start a farm as they did not have the resources or the money to pay for them.
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Making farming a Public Industry.The second thing they tried was to pay people to start their own farms as a solution to the first attempt. They would give people enough money to start their own farms and would have to be paid back within 3 years. It is essentially just a loan from the government. This technique was unsuccessful because not many people knew how to farm successfully in a place as cold and infertile as the soviet union.
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Hiring people from abroadThe Third and most successful attempt was hiring people from abroad to teach people how to farm and to set up farm themselves. This worked as the people they hired were already farming experts and knew what they could grow and when. The main thing they grew was corn because of how many things you can do with it and how easy it is to grow.
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