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Romania Farming Practices
By the mid-1980s, more than 30 percent of the country's
10
million hectares of cropland was irrigated. The remaining
7 million
hectares were subject to recurrent and sometimes severe
droughts,
which were particularly destructive in the southern and
eastern
regions.
At the same time, large areas of land along the Danube
and in
its delta were waterlogged, and the government decided to
drain
much of this marshland and make it arable. The Danube
Delta,
covering more than 440,000 hectares, was being developed
rapidly
after 1984. By 1989 some 35,750 hectares had been made
arable and
large areas of pastureland had been created. By 1990 more
than
144,000 hectares of the delta were expected to be useful
agricultural land.
Poor crop rotation practices, with corn and wheat sown
year
after year on the same ground, led to serious depletion of
soil
nutrients, and supplies of chemical fertilizers were
inadequate to
restore the lost fertility. In the early 1980s, for
example, only
thirty-four to thirty-six kilograms of fertilizer were
available
per acre. Furthermore, much of the best farmland had been
severely
damaged by prolonged use of outsized machinery, which had
compacted
the soil, by unsystematic application of agricultural
chemicals,
and by extensive erosion.
During the first three decades of communist rule,
agricultural
planners ordered the slaughter of thousands of workhorses,
which
were to be replaced by more powerful tractors. Indeed, the
number
of tractors available to agriculture grew from 13,700 in
1950 to
168,000 in 1983. But with the onset of the energy crisis,
the
regime reversed its policy. A program adopted by the
National
Council for Agriculture, Food Industry, Forestry, and
Water
Management in 1986 called for increasing horse inventories
by
90,000 head by the end of the decade and reducing the
number of
tractors in service by nearly one-third. By 1990,
according to
plans, horse-drawn equipment would perform 18 to 25
percent of all
harvesting and virtually all hauling on livestock farms.
Data as of July 1989
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