Market Scene : Soviet Farm Reform Plan Fails to Take Root : Gorbachev thought farmers would be happy to work land under a lease with the state. But farmers in one Soviet province are saying nyet.

Pyotr Drobov calls himself a man of strong nerves, and not just because he raises bulls. Not only does he work shoulder-to-shoulder every day with tons of short-tempered bull flesh, but he risks his own money doing it.

Drobov, 43, is an arendator, or leaseholder, one of the very few in this bountiful region of the southern Soviet Union to take up the government’s offer allowing individual farmers their own holdings.

The arenda program is perhaps the most touted of the agricultural reforms that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev hopes will help this shortage-plagued country to feed itself. Begun in the fall of 1988, it assumes that farmers will be more productive if they are the “masters” of their land rather than cogs in the vast state farm system. An arendator effectively breaks off a chunk of a large collective farm and runs it under contract to the farm management.

But here in Krasnodar province on the shores of the Black and Azov seas--known as some of the richest land in the Soviet Union--the program is not catching on. And Drobov said it is easy to understand why.

“People see how much work it is, and how we’ve been deceived, and they say they’ll wait and see,” Drobov commented. “I think this whole movement of arenda has completely stalled.”

Outside his stable, amid swarming flies and pungent odors of hay and manure, the intense, work-hardened man told a tale of dogged perseverance and frustrated initiative.

In need of money to build a house so that his two sons could settle with him on the Korenovsk Elite-Seed state farm, Drobov decided to give arenda a try soon after the program was announced.

A trained cattleman, he gained approval from the state farm’s chairman to take over 90 head of the local black-spotted breed, but the terms he was forced to accept, he said, were so niggardly he could barely make ends meet.

In addition to buying his meat at relatively low prices, the collective farm takes 45% of Drobov’s profits under the arrangement. His income is based on what’s left, minus several other deductions for things like the feed he must buy from the farm.

“The arendator works like under serfdom,” Drobov said. “What they give you is what you get.”

This year, the farm postponed renewing his contract for several months, leaving him uncertain about whether he would be able to continue his leasehold and how much money he could expect to make.

He has also been unable to get equipment that would lighten some of his back-breaking workload, although he did manage to obtain a small tractor--a major victory.

Drobov said he found that he has no chance of winning whenever he butts heads with the farm chairman, and has come to believe that local authorities, unwilling to give up their control of the farm system, are intent on squelching leaseholding.

The state-run Soviet press, at first filled with rosy accounts of family-run farms springing up, has begun to focus more on the headaches that drive them out of business. Gorbachev, himself a farm boy, has complained that leaseholders are regarded by their jealous neighbors as “Rockefellers.”

In a speech to leaseholders in May, Gorbachev bemoaned their problems, noting that they have trouble obtaining even such simple supplies as nails.

“All this should be sold in stores,” he said, “so that leaseholders could just drive to a store and buy what they need”--a novel concept in a country where most agricultural supplies have been distributed through Moscow-based ministries for decades.

The Soviet president also promised to issue a decree that would force resistant local authorities to put the two-year-old law on leasing into practice.

But so far, that decree has not come out. And meanwhile, Krasnodar region’s leaders do not hide their disdain for the idea of breaking up the plantation-sized holdings created at such horrendous human cost during the forced collectivization period in 1929-30.

Nikolai I. Kondratenko, head of Krasnodar’s regional council, complained in an interview in his airy office that the region has been branded conservative for its opposition to private farming.

But “the whole world is moving toward concentration and specialization” in farming, he argued. “Now that we’ve come to industrial technologies, even if through grief and suffering, to destroy them would be insanity.”

Kondratenko agreed that the Soviet farmer must be made to feel more like the owner of his land, but said that could be accomplished through other reforms, including selling farmers shares in their collective farms and dividing up income proportionally.

He also backed greater independence for farms and increasing the size of the private plots where rural residents are allowed to grow fruits and vegetables and sell them as small-scale entrepreneurs.

As the arenda program functions now, Kondratenko said, “a big farm may be working pretty well, and then along comes a person who says: ‘Give me land. I want to be a private owner.’ Does he have a right to it? He does.”

But authorities are reluctant to give away land when that may mean it will be farmed less efficiently, he said.

“You know, today, this farmer has found out the advantages of collective farms” and the greater efficiency of working on a large scale, Kondratenko said.

Actually, Drobov seems to have discovered the reverse.

For all the restrictions, supply problems and conflicts, Drobov figures he is now earning three times the 250 rubles per month (about $400 at the official exchange rate) that an ordinary cattleman earns on a state farm. All he has to do is work at least 10 hours a day, seven days a week, without vacations.

And the emotional rewards, he said, cannot compare.

“I so love this work,” Drobov said. “I’m small, but I’m a master. I watch what comes in and what goes out, and it’s a joy to my soul.”