page_title: Collective farming
section_title: Iroquois and Huron of North America
hierarchical_section_title: Collective farming / Pre-20th century history / Case studies / Iroquois and Huron of North America
context_page_description: Collective farming and communal farming are various types of "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: Agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective, and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy.
context_section_description: The Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals.  The Huron had "as much land as they need[ed]."  As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally.  Any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct.  He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields.  Once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. While the Huron did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance; the placement of corn storage vessels in the longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common.
  The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution.  The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation.  The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan. Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's.
  The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans.  Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.
caption: Latter-day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people
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