Volkseigenes Gut

The Volkseigenes Gut (German for People-Owned Property; abbreviated VEG) was a state-owned farm in the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), corresponding to the Soviet Sovkhoz and the Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne in the People's Republic of Poland. In contrast to the Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) or collective farm, another form of state agricultural enterprise, the VEGs were often the successors to former private farms which resulted from the land reform in the Soviet sector of Germany mandated in the Potsdam Agreement of 1945.

Each VEG was directly integrated into national economic planning. They were either central or subordinated to the district (Bezirk).

A Volkseigenes Gut was state property and the agricultural counterpart to the state-owned enterprise, in the GDR Volkseigener Betrieb. They were run by a director according to the principle of individual management. Unlike the LPG, the workers employed on a VEG had no say in running it.

Initially, the VEGs predominantly raised animals and plants and propagated seed to supply LPGs.

In 1960, the approximately 690 VEGs had under cultivation approximately 6.3 percent of the available agricultural land in the GDR. However, in the course of the general concentration and specialisation in agriculture, by 1980 their number had fallen to 385.

As with the LPGs, so with the VEGs, in the late 1960s, a politically motivated separation of animal husbandry from arable farming was instituted. The VEB-P (for Pflanzenproduktion, "plant production") and VEB-T (for Tierproduktion, "animal production") classifications arose. However, these were simultaneously amalgamated into larger units, so that their total numbers declined from 511 in 1970 to 465 in 1985, while the agricultural land under cultivation by the VEGs remained almost constant at approximately 440,000 hectares.

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