Agriculture in East Germany

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Agriculture in East Germany" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (October 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (November 2016) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,808 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Landwirtschaft in der DDR]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Landwirtschaft in der DDR}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article describes the development of agriculture in East Germany, both the Soviet occupation zone of Germany as well as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between the years 1945 and 1990.

The agricultural policy in the GDR occurred in three phases. The first of which was the so-called Bodenreform ("land reform"), where around 40% of the land used for cultivation was expropriated and redistributed without compensation. In 1952 the second phase of collectivization coincided with the abolition of privately owned and run farms. As early as the 1960s the third phase of specialization and industrialization began, in which the GDR leadership tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate the superiority of socialism through forced collectivization and economic structures which originated in opposition of the so-called capitalist foreign countries.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the trend in East German agriculture was toward larger units; some crop-producing collectives and state-owned farms combined to create Agricultural Cooperatives holding up to 4,000 or 5,000 hectares. These agribusinesses, known as Cooperative Departments of Crop Production ("Kooperative Abteilung Pflanzenproduktion" – KAP ), which included food-processing establishments, became the dominant form of agricultural enterprise in crop production. In the early 1980s, specialization also increased to include livestock production.^[1]

In 1985, East German agriculture employed 10.8 percent of the labor force, received 7.4 percent of gross capital investments, and contributed 8.1 percent to the country's net product.^[2] Farms were usually organized either in state-owned farms ("Volkseigenes Gut") or collective farms ("Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften").