Agronomy, state and social

Agronomy, state and social. The sum of the means used by voluntary civil organizations, agencies of local self-government, or the state to improve the level of agrotechnological culture. In principle these means are of an organizational and educational character, for in the final analysis the subject of agricultural activity is the individual farmer. It was only under the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union that the measures used by state agronomy assumed for the most part a coercive nature and became an integral part of the state’s agricultural policy.

In the Russian Empire there was sharp opposition between the government bureaucracy and society. As a result, the zemstvos began to develop a zemstvo agronomy that was distinguished from the agronomic measures taken by the state authorities. In Western Europe there was no such gulf between the government and society; hence, such terms as social agronomy or state agronomy were not used. In the Russian Empire the state’s interest in agronomy was channeled through the Ministry of Agriculture and State Properties, which carried out its responsibilities by employing government agronomists and instructors. Zemstvo agronomy in Ukraine originated at the end of the 1880s, when the Kherson zemstvo set up an institute of county and gubernia zemstvo agronomists. By 1 January 1914 there were 1,683 community (zemstvo and agricultural society) agronomists in the nine gubernias of Ukraine.

Among the purely agronomic measures pursued by the zemstvos priority was given to the purchase of farm machinery and implements and of seed and fertilizer. Relatively little was achieved in the area of formal agricultural education: in 1914 there were only 28 lower schools and one secondary agricultural school. Instead, much attention was devoted to extracurricular agricultural training-lectures, exhibits, visits to the villages by agronomists and instructors. In the final few years preceding the First World War the first agricultural societies and co-operatives were established in Ukraine. As these societies developed, the task of acquiring the necessary instruments and supplies for farming was removed from the zemstvo agronomic organizations, and the zemstvo agronimist increasingly became an organizer of agricultural activity. This tendency finally asserted itself at the All-Russian Agronomic Congress in Kyiv in 1913. Zemstvo agronomists began to devote more and more time to scientific research and to demonstrations of new methods for the farmers. A whole new science of state and social agronomy developed from the zemstvo agronomy. The most prominent representative of this science among Ukrainian was Professor Kost Matsiievych.

In the 1920s, during the period of the New Economic Policy, farming in Soviet Ukraine was largely in the hands of individual farmers, and farming co-operatives flourished. Hence, the role of the agronomist was not essentially different from what it was before the Revolution of 1917. But the collectivization of 1929 radically changed this state of affairs and turned agronomy into an instrument of the state and Communist Party apparat. Social and state agronomy as it is here understood ceased to exist.

In Western Ukraine social agronomy took the form of the Silskyi Hospodar society, which was active in Galicia and under the Polish regime in Volhynia (Lutsk branch) as well. The Poles had their separate agricultural societies: in Galicia, for example, they had the Little Polish Agricultural Society. Under Austrian rule state agronomy was the responsibility of the Galician Diet and Bukovynian Diet and was administered by county executives. There were no state agronomists. In the interwar Poland agronomists were employed by provincial and county governments. Furthermore, the voivodeships had agricultural assemblies consisting of elected representatives who played the role of intermediaries between the producer, the farm industry, and the Ministry of Agriculture. They were also responsible for overseeing the activities of the institutions of social agronomy.

In the Ukrainian SSR the agronomic organizations became parts of the state apparatus that governed the whole productive process of farming. The All-Union-republican Ministry of Agriculture (formerly the People's Commissariat of Land Affairs) directed this apparatus. Only the state farms did not come under this ministry but were the responsibility of a special Ministry of State Farms, which was a Union-republican ministry at first and then became an All-Union Ministry. There were agricultural departments in the oblast (or krai) executive committees and agricultural commissions in the rural soviets. Furthermore, there were agricultural departments of the Central Committee of the CPSU and of the central committees of the various republics, as well as of the oblast and raion Party committees. The Soviet state and the Communist Party machine employed a large number of specialists who had higher and secondary agricultural education. A special role in the implementation of the state’s decisions on agriculture was played by the machine-tractor stations, which were abolished in 1958. Support for the higher agricultural schools was provided for in the All-Union budget, while the lower and secondary schools were provided for in the republican budgets. However, almost all the expenditures for basic work in state agronomy—maintenance of research stations, demonstration points, and agronomic and zootechnical networks and workshops; the organization of soil improvement and hydrotechnical projects that did not have a national significance; veterinary care; agroeducational work; and pest-eradication projects—were charged to local budgets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matsievich, K. (Ashin, K.). Obshchestvenno-agronomicheskie etiudy (Kharkiv 1912)
Morachevskii, V. Agronomicheskaia pomoshch' v Rossii (Kharkiv 1914)
Dedusenko, A. Agronomicheskaia pomoshch' naseleniiu Ukrainy (Kharkiv 1923)
Matsiievych, K. ‘Agronomiia hromads'ka,’ in Sil's'kohospodars'ka entsyklopediia (Lviv 1930)
Khraplyvyi, Ie. Za khliborobs'ku spravu (Lviv 1932)

Yevhen Glovinsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]