In the Hungarian People's Republic, agricultural collectivization was attempted a number of times in the late 1940s, until it was finally successfully implemented in the early 1960s.
These regulations enabled over 800 square kilometers of land to be confiscated, 60% of which went to recently formed farming co-operatives, the rest going to private peasants.
Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join co-operatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages.
[6] Even once collectivized, farms were subject to harsh compulsory deliveries (production quotas in physical units passed down from central planning) and incredibly low agricultural producer prices.
Without credit from the government, or any reasonable ability to earn a surplus, peasants were unable to invest in their own farms and the co-operatives began to crumble.
The weaknesses in the Stalinist model had been rather apparent to some after the first wave in the early 1950s, but the inflexibility of the Rákosi government left no room for any creative solutions.
Another shift that resulted from the Agrarian Theses was a new willingness on the part of Party to accept household plots belonging to members of co-operative farms.
The acceptance of household plots grew primarily out of necessity; the infrastructure required to shelter livestock co-operatively could simply not be built quickly enough.
In 1959, a report to the Political Committee worried that in some areas, local farm leaders continued to oppose the creation of household plots and made life difficult for those private owners.
Demoralized after two successive (and harsh) collectivization campaigns and the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the peasants were less interested in resisting, and as membership levels increased, those who remained likely grew worried about being left out.
Whether or not peasants really wanted to join, the adjustments made to the agricultural system in 1957 clearly managed to satisfy the membership adequately enough that the co-operatives did not fall apart as they had in the past.
[15] This isolated situation left the peasants open to obvious discrimination and they suffered from a lack of financial and structural support from the state.
[16] In contrast, transitional measures in Hungary worked with the concerns of the farmers, allowing them mechanical independence, semi-private production on their household plots and crop-shared fields, and a decent standard of living from higher agricultural producer prices and substantial government investment.
With the ever-looming uncertainty of collectivization, Hungarian farmers became fearful and hesitant to purchase even simple tools to improve the production of their farms.
Additionally, many of the individual farms which operated before the collectivization attempts in the late 1940s and 1950s which were used for specific agricultural niches, such as horse-breeding and viticulture, for which there was a significant market, were changed to instead produce food crops.