Cooperative plant production department
The cooperative plant production departments (abbreviated KAP ) summarized the field management of several LPG and VEG in the former GDR .
In the course of collectivization , which came to an end in the so-called socialist spring 1960, a large number of agricultural production cooperatives (LPG) had emerged. Since the SED , especially from VI. At the party congress called for industrial agriculture , there were numerous unions that were promoted with economic incentives. The SED also advocated cooperation between the farms. Cooperative communities were formed. In this one operated a gradually increasing cooperation of several LPG or nationally owned goods (VEG) and other companies such as agrochemical centers (ACZ).
The collaboration in these cooperative communities finally culminated in the fact that the field management areas were separated from the farms and cooperative departments for plant production were formed. This process began in the late 1960s and ended in the late 1970s.
The LPG were only left with animal production and in some cases also the management of the grassland . The KAP were almost exclusively specialized in plant production, and rarely did they also keep sheep. The work organization in the KAP, which mostly specializes in one or two main products, was mostly based on products, for example there were brigades that dealt almost exclusively with potato production. With the formation of these field farms, there was an enormous increase in the operational area. The average size of a KAP in 1975 was 4122 hectares, but there were also farms with more than 10,000 hectares, whereas an LPG type III still had an average usable area of 605 hectares in 1965.
With the introduction of industrial production methods, the ties between those employed in agriculture and the village and the soil were often broken. The SED tried to stop this process, especially at the beginning of the 1980s , by propagating and implementing the territorial work organization, among other things. It was hoped that this would restore greater clarity to the production process.
The KAP ultimately only represented a transitional form. From the mid-1970s, the SED pushed for their conversion into LPG plant production (LPG (P)) and VEG (P), which was largely completed at the beginning of the following decade.
literature
- Heinz, Michael: Of combine harvesters and model villages. Industrialization of GDR agriculture and the change in rural life using the example of the northern districts. Metropol , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-90-9 .
- Kipping, Manfred: Rural economic reason against dirigism in the KAP education in Oberwiera. In: Ilona Buchsteiner , Siegfried Kuntsche (Ed.): Agricultural cooperatives in the past and present. 50 years after the formation of agricultural production cooperatives in the GDR. Universitätsdruckerei Rostock, Rostock 2004, pp. 135–143, ( Rostock Contributions to German and European History 12, ISSN 1431-410X ).
- Schier, Barbara: Everyday life in the "socialist" village. Merxleben and his LPG in the field of tension of the SED agricultural policy 1945–1990. Waxmann, Münster et al. 2001, ISBN 3-8309-1099-1 ( Munich contributions to folklore 30 = Munich university publications ).
- Schöne, Jens: Agriculture in the GDR 1945–1990. State Center for Civic Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2005, ISBN 3-931426-90-4 .