Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign & Food Security in the USSR 

2:47 A Vozhd!

Maybe you will talk about Lake Aral tragedy

@@percamihai-marco7157 Have you ever heard of the tragedy of Lake Aral the non-existent at this point?

@@percamihai-marco7157 that REALLY RELATES to the Virgin lands.

what do you think about on-line gambling for children (the world of warships model) ... where apart from being gambling, loot boxes don't even disclose the incredibly poor odds?

I see no failure in your logic

Had he named it Chad Land Campaign and import foreign worker from the country of Chad to work on the land, it might have save Soviet Union from dissolution due to its massive and strong agriculture economy.

Virgin soil/land has the meaning today. It means it has never been actively cultivated and farmed before.

@@OffGridInvestor it's a meme tho 🤣🤣

@@OffGridInvestor R/woooooooshhhh

_Кто-нибудь даст этому человеку медаль!_

KGB enters the chat.

@@wasimshaikh1665 КГБ хочет знать ваше местонахождение...

😜

😂😂😂😂

But in the end, the lands were the true chads

LOL amazing

@@luisfelipegoncalves4977 maybe Russia would be better if Krushchev never came to power but maybe Beria or Malenkov instead

@@degamispoudegamis better tahn braznev

"Yields 120% crop surplus without ever seeing a modern tractor"

Got 🦕

"i'm gonna eat you!"

Nikita Khrushchev, The Funni Corn Man

He did actually love Iowa. This whole thing happened because he went on a state visit to the US and saw the cornfields in the Midwest.

He probably would've also really liked Ohio to an extent

Neither did he go to the Orange Free State in South Africa. LOL. The African savanna is excellent for maize production.

@@joeblow9657 no one loves Ohio

​@@joeblow9657 nice try lol. there's nothing to like about Ohio

yes. And then there weren't enough trucks to transport the harvest even if there were enough people and machines to harvest it. So the crops rotted in the fields, and in the warehouses, and what didn't rot was spoiled by rats and mice. I've read estimates that some years only 25% of the potential harvest actually made it to consumers, the rest went to waste because of infrastructure deficiencies.

@@jwenting that sounds like the USSR

Makes you wonder if the us and ussr weren't in a giant dick measuring contest how much better people's lives would be. Some of these problems could have been solved by trade with each other

@@jeffbrewer1580They did. Exports of Corn from US jumped from 1964 to about 1984, then China took over. This is when you start hearing about US farmers getting payed to plow over or burn their harvests, because our government couldn't keep prices up anymore.

@@jeffbrewer1580 It was and the irony was that the people who they supposedly represented lost out. In the US, the corn farmers have become rich through fixed prices and subsidies from government. Consumers lost out by paying higher prices. Moreover wholesalers could control prices by controlling supply. The long and the short is that the free market does not exist. Capitalism leads to accumulation of capital which leads to oligopolies in the long run. In a controlled autocratic economy where a megalomaniac has a hunch and sticks with it can be disastrous as is in this case and Mao's great leap forward. "Communism" never worked out because the very institution it claimed to represent the, proletariat were exploited just as badly as the Tzar. It was never Marxism but a substitution of Tzarist Russia with the "Communist Party". Eventually glasnost failed because the damage was too far gone. The vacuum allowed another dictator to grab power as populice do not know any better. Similarly in the US with the USSR going belly up there was no incentive for the elites to share their loot. The CCP promised low wages and taxes to their operations so they moved most of it there at the expense of the populice leading to a diminished standard of living to the US populice and increased income and wealth for them and their crony politicians. Good fun to watch from the sidelines and crap if you're playing the game.

Can we get this man more likes?

I don’t get it.

It's like the apocryphal story of the forge-workers pulling a wagon with a 50' nail on it. A passerby asked one of the workers what such a gigantic nail is used for, to which the worker replied "I don't know, but it fulfils our quota of 20 tons of nails per month".................

This reminds me of couple of jokes from my history book: -Two border guards watch berlin wall. One of them asks what other is thinking. He answers that he thinks same as asker, to which latter answers: "If that's the case, I'm afraid that I have to arrest you." The next one is from 90s, when there was shortage of goods in USSR, and people traveled hundreds of kilometers to get meat and other food. -What is green, long and smells like sausage? Train to Moscow.

Rain was supposed to follow the plow

That's good old Russian nihilism at work.

Idk the US has done pretty well with their endless fields of corn and soy beans. The Dust Bowl was pretty much the only hiccup

People HUGELY underestimate the science and knowledge that farming requires. They don't see all the testing, the math and everything that goes into producing agriculture goods. I'd argue it's far easier to produce something in a factory than it is to go farming these days.

@@Fattybryce true!

@@arthas640 Our latest projection shows that the overall food insecurity rates rose sharply, from 10.9% in 2019 to 13.9% in 2020. In terms of people, that means a rise from 35.2 million food insecure Americans in 2019 to 45 million in 2020. theconversation.com/the-pandemic-recession-has-pushed-a-further-9-8-million-americans-into-food-insecurity-157016

Finally someone said it

Oh man, I own land like that. Some joker in an office thought it was a good idea to plow deeper than the grazing land depth and turned a perfectly fine grazing hill into a pile of rocks. Luckily our local indigenous ecosystem is holm forest, so we planted it and in 100 years it will probably be back as it was at the start. The folly of men.

Same in Australia, now we plant trees to stop winds

I ask this question out of genuine curiosity. Does Mongolia hope to retrieve “Inner Mongolia” from China some day? Or have Mongols given up on that land? I’m Indian.

That Chad Sea is called the Aral Sea

You can say that, they have built full scale Blue Sea fleet in 60-ties and 70-ties.

@@user-df1ek5rc1h sea, desert. Same thing

@@user-df1ek5rc1h Nice one!!!

No they launches the Chad Space champaign. lol

food is just a luxury of decadent bourgeois societies

In Kazakhstan.

arguably uzbekistan too but thats for cotton......... if youre ok with draining a lake the size of texas to do it

Lucky guy. 🤣😜👍

Used to? 😢

absolutely.

It requires more because it gives you more. You Comme's want to grow cheap potatoes and that makes everyone malnourished.

@@cowsmuggler1646 It's a surprise that the USSR didn't suffer a potato famine like Ireland.

This is a good question.

Yeah, that was a question in the back of my mind as well

Keep in mind a lot of that land is filled with endless forests or frozen tundra that is inflicted with Permafrost so its problematic to grow certain things to begin with even in warmer months. Of course the Soviet Government didn’t help matters when there was a surplus of food and they rather trade it with other nations than redistributed with the people, or Stalin's case deliberate starvation because of his own mad paranoia.

I understand the starvation right after the awful civil war and in the 40ies but it made no sense to starve in the peaceful years after WW2. As of the inhospitable terrain issue, before the USSR Siberia was the largest producer of butter in the world, thanks to some Danish specialists who settled there and started production. So that land could definitely be used for something.

Potatoes are great for that type of land but there is a strong need to diversify crops. Farming in those lands require a less intensive type and planning should be around what farmers and agronomist know best. The main issue of the Soviet economy showed us its crack right there. Kruschev was no farmer but dictate his policy, I will say it as it was, his will despite not knowing how to work in the land. When this channel hits Cuba the same problem will appear as Castro tries to increase Cuba's Sugar production to a record high. Leaders can lead people in their field of expertise, however great leaders know that delegating and listening to their Ministers (Secretary if you are American) is being humble enough not trying to outdone him/herself.

@u666sa USSR probably tried to dump off some of that radioactive wool, leather and other stuff they kept harvesting after Chernobyl on them in the aid shipments.

@u666sa Possibly without knowing, all that stuff went somewhere if they harvested it. I doubt anyone scanned or tested any of it once it was processed into goods. As for radiated scrap metal, that happened in the US on some shipments from Mexico.

People Person. I immediately thought of the parallels with the 'Groundnuts Scheme'.

That's communism. A bad idea comes out, no one wants to go again their leader/party so they just keep going even after the problems pop up. The fact that underlings are forced to exaggerate their performance to meet unrealistic goals means the guys at the top domt know what's really going on so they tend to take on more then they can handle because everyone below them agrees with whatever they say and the underlings keep claiming to be able to do far more then they're actually doing. There were some mines that claimed a single miner with a puckaxe could mine 10 tons of material or more a day when they couldnt do 10% of what they claimed. The USSR basically tried to do what they US did in the midwest and west but they were arrogant and thought they could do in one 5 year plan what took the US decades

The US had similar problem. Remember the "dust bowl"? Virgin lands were cultivated despite warnings from scientists like Powell. It was a popular belief that "rain follows the plow"

@@UshankaShow yeah but at least the US had the excuse of a poorer understanding of climate at the time and the areas had more natural irrigation with more rivers, lakes, and available wells. The US also had decades of farming on the area befor the dust bowl hit and later with some engineering they overcame the problems. Things like some dams and planting trees to break up winds, trap moisture, and prevent river banks washing away were enough to prevent future dust bowls. The area also has always had alot of farming going back to pre european contact whereas the Soviet lands were traditionally grazing land for cattle before large scale agriculture. The land the Soviets were developing had less available moisture, worse winters, and less beneficial geography and even today many of those areas don't have much sustainable farming and have less profitable returns on their farming. Both do provide examples of why you should listen to experts and the Dust Bowl lead to agricultural science being a booming field in farming and even today alot of farmers go to school and have some college graduates on the payroll

Thats communism working as intended See in a capitalist society if some nutjob wants to harvest some corn, he has to invest his own cash, not the countrys resources, he cant force people to move to the new farms, he must offer inventives, and if everything fails, he will eventually run out of cash and limit how much damage he does, a communist government just keeps going and going, doubling down on the mistakes

because the state directs resources to whatever goal they have in mind, it means that if the state deems it enough of a necessity, it wont waste time with considering every angle (not just whether the goal can be met but also any consequences, intentional or otherwise). this is magnified for the time period because not a whole lot of people considered "environmental concerns" when making decisions. every country has a problem of this type but the soviets are the most notorious because they dont perform due diligence before or after ( this is the same country that drained a gigantic lake to make land for cotton, made a lake with a nuke testing to see if you could use a nuke for construction projects, made a literal gate to hell in the desert, built an island to test anthrax located in the same lake they drained for cotton, dumped millions of tons of nucelar waste in a lake thats known to dry out in hot enough summers, etc)

Hydroponics, Alternative-Energy, proliferation of wasted / re-usable plastics...

More like inherent ineffeciency of the communist system. Technology made whole plan possible, it’s the people and management that failed.

@@Rabarbarzynca Yes, it was both the ineffeciency of the system and lidership plus the ineffeciency tehnology and infrastructure .

The efficiency was far inferior before the communists, that’s why the population exploded afterwards despite suffering civil war and the worst war in history (Axis invasion)

Cool story bro

😂😂😂 those pesky skilled farmers

@@philthornton1382 Yeah and even when their skills can't quite cut it there's always insurance.

What about Ontario and Quebec farmers?

@@shauncameron8390 Unknown to me. Probably a bit of the same.

no, they still had food deficit until the end. mostly and simply because farmers work for collective farms, were dirty poor (much more than urban workers), unmotivated and not getting more money if the succeded, indeed if a collective farm perform very poorly was put under state controll, so absolutly no incentive for better working, neither farmers nor factory workers and managers in the cities...

They had 70 years of bad harvests due to bad weather until the USSR ceased to exist. Then the food production increased.

That's Richard Branson's place, isn't it?