[2] Until the early 1920s the farm was a hothouse and catalyst for social and economical innovation, which helped mold and create several essential institutions and infrastructure elements of the Yishuv, perpetuated in the State of Israel after 1948: communal settlement forms (kvutza, kibbutz, moshav), women's rights movement, cooperative enterprises (for supplies and financial aid, milk collection and dairy production, construction and public works), a workers' savings and support bank, public health care system, a national paramilitary organisation.
From 1949 on, after the establishment of the State of Israel, the courtyard served different lesser military and civilian purposes, was abandoned, then restored as a heritage site, and it 2007 it was opened as a museum and educational centre.
[3] During this time, among other achievements, five groups from the farm have established the kibbutz settlements of Degania (1909/1910), Kinneret (1913), Afikim (1932), Ein Gev (July 1937) and Ma'agan (1949).
[3] The farm was created in June 1908 as an experiment by the Palestine Bureau [he] of the Zionist Organisation, and although it shared infrastructure and some activities with the moshava (health, security, cultural life), it was separate and autonomous from it as it served different practical and sometimes ideological purposes.
[8] The original Jewish settlers stayed in the so-called Khan, a word meaning caravansary, and being no more than a storage building bought from a local Bedouin tribe.
They were a young group who received from the national Zionist organisations a plot of land to toil, which they managed to do more successfully than the hierarchically run Kinneret farm.
One of the founders of the Kinneret Farm, Ben-Zion Israeli [he] (1887–1984), helped reintroduce date palms to Palestine by travelling to Iraq, Iran, Kurdistan and Egypt in the 1930s where he identified suitable varieties of which he bought and adventurously brought back large quantities of saplings.
The Farm residents also had a major role in establishing and shaping the labor union of pre-state Israel: In 1949, the courtyard became a military camp of the IDF.
[11] Here one can find the graves going back to 1911, among them those of Berl Katznelson, Nachman Syrkin, Rachel Bluwstein, Ber Borochov, Moses Hess, Avraham Herzfeld and Shmuel Stoller.