Illinois Farmer Roots Through Soviet Collective for Answers : Agriculture: He is shocked by what he finds: 1,000 workers on a farm about twice the size of the one he runs with five.

Illinois corn farmer Maury Gordon came to the Gorky Collective Farm, 30 miles outside Moscow, on Wednesday looking for answers.

He didn’t get any good ones from the collective’s manager, Vasily Momrov.

So, like a stubborn detective searching for clues, Gordon lit out on his own, stomping through muddy fields and barns, talking to milkmaids and livestock tenders, probing one of the biggest mysteries in the Soviet Union: Why is this country’s agricultural system so messed up?

Even for an expert like Gordon, the answers proved elusive. Yet on his first visit to a Soviet farm, some basic flaws in the system were painfully clear: The Gorky collective has 1,000 workers operating a farm not much more than twice the size of the one in Illinois that Gordon manages with five. And that includes Gordon and his two sons.

“What in the world do they do with them all?” wondered Gordon, a beefy, plain-spoken man with the penetrating eyes of a good judge of horse flesh. “What do they have them do all day, hold hands?”

Gordon, 62, is the only American farmer in a high-level delegation of new agricultural specialists sent to the Soviet Union by President Bush to determine how best the United States can help the Soviets deal with their mounting food problems.

He and the rest of the delegation, headed by Gordon’s former congressman and old friend, Agriculture Secretary Edward R. Madigan, were urged by Bush in an Oval Office send-off Tuesday to bring him answers and recommendations on Western food aid before the onset of winter.

Gordon, who spent just one semester in college and the rest of his life on his 2,100-acre farm, took his first presidential mandate seriously.

So on his first day in the Soviet Union, he immediately dug in, trying to figure out why the Russians can’t master the same fundamentals of agriculture that he has practiced since he began to farm for himself in Champaign, Ill., in 1948.

As Madigan and the rest of his entourage were led around the farm, Gordon, frustrated by Momrov’s evasive answers to his technical questions, split off, wandering through sheds and storerooms, buttonholing workers with the help of an interpreter.

Where do they store their produce? How many trucks do they need to get their goods to market? What kind of seed do they use? And above all, Gordon kept asking everyone he met why the Soviets need 1,000 workers to farm 4,500 acres.

“This place is just mind-boggling,” Gordon said.

The Gorky Collective produces milk, potatoes, vegetables and flowers for markets in Moscow. It is to be privatized by the end of the year, with collective members receiving shares in the operation early next year. Dotted about the collective are small, well-tended private plots cultivated by individual members. It is a showcase for Western visitors.

Still, said Gordon, it is stuck “about where our farms were 50 years ago. No, worse.”

Indeed, for a modern American farmer accustomed to the most advanced machinery, the latest in sophisticated fertilizers and the most up-to-date farming techniques, trying to judge a Soviet collective requires a giant stretch of imagination. It is, as Gordon says, alien to everything in American agriculture. “What do I judge it against?” Gordon asked himself. “The way my father farmed when I was 10?”

That is a critical question for the West. The Bush Administration and its European allies are demanding better information on the state of Soviet agriculture before they decide just how much food aid they might provide. While the White House agreed this week to accelerate loan guarantees for Soviet purchases of U.S. grain, the Administration has held off on announcing a massive new food program until Western experts can determine exactly what is wrong and how the West can help fix it.

Despite the increased scrutiny in the past few weeks by Western specialists, a consensus on the nature of the food problem here is proving elusive. While U.S. experts, for example, believe that Soviet distribution bottlenecks are in the cities, a team of British specialists in Moscow reported this week that they believe falling grain production is at fault.

There is even less agreement among Soviet and Western officials over the severity of current food shortages and the likelihood of winter hunger. While senior Soviet officials have repeatedly warned that hunger will stalk the country this winter if the West does not provide aid soon, U.S. officials aren’t so sure.

“The figures the Soviets have been giving us don’t add up,” Madigan said in an interview Wednesday. “So that is why we came, to see for ourselves.”

In fact, even grass-roots Soviet agriculture specialists at the Gorky Collective strongly disagreed with the official line that severe hunger will hit in months. “There will be no problem of starving this winter,” insisted collective manager Momrov in an interview. “It will not happen.”

Momrov noted, for instance, that potatoes are so plentiful right now that prices are relatively low; as a result, his collective plans to hold its potato harvest off the market until March, when prices are likely to rise again at winter’s end.

None of what he heard officially rang true for Gordon on Wednesday, and he did not believe anything he could not see or touch.

So he got dirty checking out the Gorky collective. On his way through a barnyard, he grabbed a pile of corn silage and smelled to see if it was fresh. He wandered through the stockyards to see if the calves are given enough fresh air and room to grow. He asked about supplies of spare parts for tractors.

And he found that the collective is misusing its new, expensive supply of U.S. hybrid corn seed and predicted that the better strain of corn would vanish from the collective in a year because of the misuse.

“What I found and heard from the workers was like night and day compared to what that guy Momrov was saying,” said Gordon in disgust.

Yet Gordon still believes that the United States has little choice but to provide the Soviets with some immediate help: “I think what we will have to do is give some food this winter, we can’t do anything else. And then after that, we can try to start working on the answers to all of these problems next year.”