314 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
Marxism or an affinity for Soviet life.^28 ‘Rather it was because the Soviet idea of
growing wheat on an industrial scale and in an industrial fashion was similar to US
ideas about the direction American agriculture should take.’^29 Soviet collectiviza-
tion represented, to these American viewers, an enormous demonstration project
without the political inconveniences of American institutions; ‘that is, the Ameri-
cans viewed the giant Soviet farms as huge experiment stations on which Ameri-
cans could try out their most radical ideas for increasing agricultural production,
and, in particular, wheat production. Many of the things they wished to learn
more about simply could not be tried in America, partly because it would cost too
much, partly because no suitable large farmsite was available, and partly because
many farmers and farm laborers would be alarmed at the implications of this
experimentation.’^30 The hope was that the Soviet experiment would be to Ameri-
can industrial agronomy more or less what the Tennessee Valley Authority was to
be to American regional planning: a proving ground and a possible model for
adoption.
Although Campbell did not accept the Soviet offer of a vast demonstration
farm, others did. M. L. Wilson, Harold Ware (who had extensive experience in the
Soviet Union), and Guy Riggin were invited to plan a huge mechanized wheat
farm of some 500,000 acres of virgin land. It would be, Wilson wrote to a friend,
the largest mechanized wheat farm in the world. They planned the entire farm
layout, labour force, machinery needs, crop rotations and lockstep work schedule
in a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in December 1928.^31 The fact that they
imagined that such a farm could be planned in a Chicago hotel room underlines
their presumption that the key issues were abstract, technical interrelationships
that were context-free. As Fitzgerald perceptively explains: ‘Even in the U.S., those
plans would have been optimistic, actually, because they were based on an unreal-
istic idealization of nature and human behavior. And insofar as the plans repre-
sented what the Americans would do if they had millions of acres of flat land, lots
of laborers, and a government commitment to spare no expense in meeting pro-
duction goals, the plans were designed for an abstract, theoretical kind of place. This
agricultural place, which did not correspond to America, Russia, or any other
actual location, obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, recognized no political
or ideological stance.’^32
The giant sovkhoz, named Verblud, which they established near Rostov-on-
Don, one thousand miles south of Moscow, comprised 375,000 acres that were to
be sown to wheat. As an economic proposition, it was an abject failure, although
in the early years it did produce large quantities of wheat. The detailed reasons for
the failure are of less interest for our purposes than the fact that most of them
could be summarized under the rubric of context. It was the specific context of this
specific farm that defeated them. The farm, unlike the plan, was not a hypothe-
cated, generic, abstract farm but an unpredictable, complex and particular farm,
with its own unique combination of soils, social structure, administrative culture,
weather, political strictures, machinery, roads and the work skills and habits of its
employees. As we shall see, it resembled Brasília in being the kind of failure typical