[1] The Soviet authorities socialized agriculture, permitting only small private plots and animal holdings on the vast state and collective farms.
[2] Private household plots, despite their small size (0.5 hectare, maximum), played a significant role in the agricultural sector by supplementing the output of the notoriously inefficient state and collective farms.
[2] From 1940 to 1990, livestock production nearly doubled; by contrast, crop cultivation increased by only 14 percent, despite major investments in soil drainage and fertilization projects.
[2] As the centralized Soviet system collapsed, however, a shortage of feed and the rising costs of farm equipment took a toll.
[2] More than 1 million hectares of agricultural land, much of it abandoned, were converted to forest under Soviet rule.