The first attempts at voluntary collectivization yielded modest results, partly because open coercion was impossible until a peace treaty was signed with the Allies.
It closely resembled Soviet cooperatives in organization, although members were guaranteed a share of profits and membership was (nominally) completely voluntary.
Although most small farmers had joined collectives, by 1949, only 12 percent of arable land was under state control — mainly because the collectivization program alienated many peasants.
But between 1950 and 1953, the Stalinist regime of Vulko Chervenkov used threats, violence, and supply discrimination to produce the fastest pace of collectivization in Eastern Europe, thus provoking the Goryani uprising.
To fulfill the ambitious goals contained in the Todor Zhivkov Theses (January 1959), for the Third Five-Year Plan (1958–60), further consolidation was deemed necessary.
In the late 1960s, an agricultural labor shortage combined with fascination for China's agrarian amalgamation to prompt further consolidation of collective farms into APKs.
On the political level, this consolidation was to be a symbolic merger of the agricultural and urban workers, who had remained quite distinct parts of the Bulgarian population since the nineteenth century, in defiance of the theory of the unified socialist society.
On the contrary, the annual reduction in agricultural employment dropped from 4 to 2 percent while farm labor productivity declined.
Reduced agricultural quotas in the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1981–85) were an admission that too much had been expected from the constant tinkering process.
The new, simpler approach also allowed greater freedom for APKs to negotiate prices on surplus production and to purchase their own supplies.
Even then, government delivery prices remained so low that state foodstuff monopolies received only the absolute minimum supply.
Beginning in 1974, peasant households were permitted to lease additional plots and given free access to fertilizer, fodder seed, and equipment belonging to their agricultural complexes.
The sales from plots to town markets meant that despite low overall agricultural growth rates in the 1980s, the urban food supply actually improved in many areas during the early and mid-1980s.
In 1991, privatization of agriculture was a top priority of the government of Prime Minister of Bulgaria Dimitar Iliev Popov.
The law allowed every Bulgarian citizen to own as much as thirty hectares of land, or twenty in areas of intensive cultivation.
As elsewhere in the Bulgarian economy, agricultural reform encountered stout resistance from entrenched local Zhivkovite officials.
Pre-collectivization land ownership records were destroyed, and farmers were threatened or bribed to remain in collectives rather than seeking private farms.
Although the Arable Land Law was widely hailed as an equitable and useful economic reform, its association with the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP, formerly the BCP) majority brought criticism from the opposition Union of Democratic Forces (UDF).
In early 1991, staples such as sugar and olive oil were unavailable in many areas; livestock feed rations had been cut by more than half; a grain shortfall of 1.7 million tons was expected; meat, withheld from markets until new government prices were announced, was very scarce and expensive in cities; and fertilizers for the year's crops were in very short supply.
Western firms expressed interest in joint agricultural ventures in Bulgaria, but hesitated because of uncertainty about political and legal conditions for such projects.