Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft

In the early 1950s, remaining farmers with largish holdings (60 to 80 ha (150 to 200 acres)) were effectively driven out of business through means such as denying access to pooled machinery and by setting production targets that rose exponentially with amount of land owned to levels that were impossible to meet.

Alongside these coercive actions of expropriation, old and new farmers with smaller land holdings were increasingly encouraged to pool resources in a legally constituted cooperative form, the LPG, in which initially just land but later animals and machinery were shared and worked together.

In most cases, however, former members or their children settled for some level of compensation in return for surrendering their membership rights to a smaller core group of former managers who then took over the business in the new form of a limited company (GmbH).

This settlement and compensation process was at times fought over and at times accepted with resignation depending often on the amount of wealth to be distributed and on the degree of trust by the general membership and village population in the ability of managers to carry on the enterprise as successful employers.

In some cases, an eingetragene Genossenschaft, a form of cooperative farming, persisted as allowed under existing German law.