From Aztec calpulli to Russian mir, farms can be joint projects
Collective and communal farming let multiple cultivators run land together—member-owned cooperatives or state-run farms. Aztec calpulli, Mexican ejidos after 1917, Wendat and Haudenosaunee commons, and the Russian mir all show how shared tenure can organize fields without private each-to-their-own plots alone.
Collective or communal farming means several farmers working their land as a single enterprise. It comes in two broad forms: cooperatives owned and run by their members, and state farms owned and managed directly by a central government. Pooling farmland in this way is called collectivisation, and it has appeared in very different societies.
In the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was organised into calpulli, local units that handled farming, schooling and religion. Each calpulli was a cluster of large extended families claiming a shared ancestor; it owned the land and assigned households the right to work portions of it. Spanish conquest replaced this with crown estates, the encomienda and forced labour. After the Mexican Revolution, the 1917 constitution swept away the remaining feudal-style rights of hacienda owners and created ejidos, communal farms on land the government bought from large estates.
In North America, the Wendat let anyone clear and farm land for as long as they kept tending it; abandoned plots returned to the community. The missionary Gabriel Sagard noted they had all the land they needed, and shared corn stores in multi-family longhouses hint that harvests were held in common. Among the Haudenosaunee the tribe owned everything, clans passed tracts to households and reshuffled them every few years, and the Clan Mothers' Council could take land from a clan that neglected it, since farming was women's work. In Imperial Russia most peasants belonged to a mir, or obshchina, which served as village government. Fields were cut into sections by soil quality and distance, each household claimed strips according to its number of adults, and a census-based reshuffle, enforced by the state, kept everyone able to pay taxes.
Under state socialism, collectivisation became compulsory. The Soviet Union imposed it between 1927 and 1933, and later the Baltic states, most of the Eastern Bloc except Poland, and China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam followed. Stalin's forced drive, with kulaks executed or deported to Siberia, was followed by the famine of 1932 to 1933, which killed an estimated 5.7 to 8.7 million people, roughly half of them Ukrainian; farm output did not beat pre-collectivisation levels until 1940.
Source: Collective farming
