A Mezőhegyesi Állami Gazdaság a gazdasági reform tükrében

Abstract

The state stud-farms, although established primarily for military purposes, are the most prestigious units of modern Hungarian agriculture. The Mezőhegyes estate – later state farm, even later food-industry and agricultural combine – is one of the oldest of these, founded in 1784. After the decline of the military use of horse, Mezőhegyes and the other stud-farms developed into a model farm-role, with research and development (as a laboratory for technical and scientific processes), but also as a production-oriented plant farm. In this role, it had particular importance during the Kádár era, especially in the context of the reform process that began in the mid-1960s. The programme, known as the New Economic Mechanism, aimed to build market socialism, and although it was stopped at the macroeconomic level in the early 1970s, it remained in force in the agriculture. During this period, a distinctive symbiosis developed between the economic- and agricultural policy and the state farms (led by Mezőhegyes): the state model farms were the showcase for the reform policy (that was repeatedly put on the agenda), while they received unprecedented infrastructure upgrading and state support. All this allowed Mezőhegyes to achieve hyper-intensive growth in production indicators and to use impressive technical equipment, but by the end of the period serious rentability problems had emerged. This paper take a broad overview of the ’company history’ of the Mezőhegyes State Farm, based on the above aspects, and will be structured according to the terms of office of the estate’s directors during the period.