The news that Industrije motor i traktor - IMT ended the production of tractors and dismissed the last 350 of the former 8000 workers somehow coincided with the commemoration of the anniversary of the "Storm", whose moving symbol was and remains permanently the tractor convoy that on August 4, 1995, 250.000 refugees from Lika, Kordun, Banija and Dalmatia sought to save lives and some property.
The story of the tractor is the story of a rise and a strategic collapse, and ultimately not only a break with the socialist legacy, but with much older entrepreneurial endeavors in our country.
The news about the liquidation of IMT was followed by pictures of the factory with empty halls, where only a few porters and a few directors are left, who are preparing the bankruptcy of the 150.000 square meter factory, in a circle of 36 hectares near Block 63, there in the plain below the Bežaniska Kosa, which was once a local called Dojno polje, the lower field which, according to older chronicles, the Sava sometimes flooded as far as Bežanija kosa so that people could tie boats to the trees on its slopes. The terrain has long since been filled up, communally equipped and surrounded by a settlement - a flood of another kind is underway, a flood of longing for brown field investments after the industrial collapse.
Excluded from the apparatus of state support, the IMR factory, which used to be called ZAR - Zavod "Aleksandar Ranković", and produced about 550.000 tractors, which mark a significant technological transformation of our country, is going into bankruptcy.
AEROPLAN I "PRAGUE","PIONEER" I "COOPERATIVE": The production of tractors started, by the way, in another factory, in IMR - Rakovica Motor Industry, which is now also undergoing restructuring. As stated in a study by the Institute for Agricultural Mechanization, in 1949, the first tractor was produced in Serbia, and in the spirit of the times it was called "cooperative".
Incidentally, this was 100 years after the first production of tractors in the world, which, as is known, began around 1858 when Otto's internal combustion engine was constructed. Serial production of tractors began after the oil-powered tractor was constructed in 1892. In England, in 1897, sales of the first "Hornsby - Ackroyd" tractors began, models in four different versions from 16 to 30 HP.
In a way, it all started two decades earlier with another, more ambitious attempt to take off. The Rakovica engine industry, which in 1949 realized that pioneering tractor venture, was founded in 1927 as the Airplane Engine Industry.
It was owned by a joint stock company whose actors were a French company Gnome et Rhone from Paris, which granted a license for the production of aircraft engines, and a group of shareholders, among whom were the Dunđerski brothers, on whose land the factory in Rakovica was built. One picture shows the factory behind which you can see the fields and forest on the site of today's Miljakovac and Kanarevo brdo.
Chronicles say that aviators, war veterans from the Thessaloniki front were responsible for the establishment of that factory, and among them Dimitrije Konjović, an experienced pilot and businessman, stood out in particular. Until World War II, he managed the Ikarus airplane factory, the first of its kind in Serbia, which was founded in 1923.
At the time of the establishment of the Rakovica Aircraft Engine Industry, there were several private aircraft industry companies in the Belgrade area: Rogožarski, Zmaj, Teleoptik, Mikron and Nestor and Ikarus...
Before the Second World War, a truck was first grafted onto that aeroplane's beginning, and after the Second World War a tractor. The factory in Rakovica started in 1938 with the production of the "Prague RN 8" truck with a carrying capacity of 2,5 tons, under the license of the Czechoslovak company Praga. At that moment, probably due to military needs, that factory was nationalized.
Based on the experience with the "threshold" fireplace and in addition to the lack of quality materials, modern machines for processing and tool making, in 1947, IMR won the production of a truck, which, also in the spirit of that time, was named "pioneer".
In the first year, 122 "pioneer" trucks were produced, in 1948 - 296, in 1949 - 318, and in 1950 - 422), and then, according to the decision of the Ministry of Heavy Industry, construction and technological documentation, tools and acquired experience were transferred to the TAM Factory in Maribor. The pioneering beginning of the tractor industry in Yugoslavia was represented by the reorientation of the Rakovica industry towards the conquest of the "Perkins" diesel engine. Without waiting for the official decision to entrust this task to the Rakovica Motor Industry, a group of engineers and technicians, then gathered in the Technical Club, began preparations for the transition to tractor production. A little later, experts from the Main Directorate for Engines of the Ministry of Heavy Industry were added to it.
It took only 18 months to win the complete production of domestic tractors. The first prototypes of the tractor "zadrugar" T-08 with a six-cylinder gasoline engine were exhibited at the Zagreb Fair in 1949.
As academician Eng. prof. Dr. Miroslav Demić, the first batch of these tractors was delivered to agricultural organizations at the end of April 1951, and by 1954, 2520 tractors were produced, the "cooperative" T-08, which was tested and certified (No. 265, 15-II-1950. ) at the Federal Institute for Agricultural Mechanization, in Zemun Polje, under the control of a special commission made up of representatives of: Ministries of People's of defense, transport, forestry, agriculture, the Military Technical Institute and the director of the engine industry.
The composition of the commission shows that it was treated as an important matter.
Since larger farms needed more powerful tractors, the Main Directorate for Engines of the Ministry of Heavy Industry decided then to purchase the license of the TCA 60 and 70 crawler tractors from the Italian company Ansaldo. Assembly was entrusted to IMR, where from 1950 to 1955 of these tractors were assembled in 1209, and then that production was transferred to Industry "14. oktobar" from Kruševac, now undergoing restructuring.
For the same factory, the tracked tractor "bender buli", whose production was mainly focused on tractors intended for construction and mining, as well as the tracked tractors TG-50 and TG-75, intended for work in agriculture, as the TG-170 model, was tested for the same factory. , intended for the so-called "cultivation" of land when establishing orchards and vineyards.
In 1954, IM Rakovica signed a contract for the production of the IM-03 diesel engine under the license of the English manufacturer "Perkins" and in 1955 produced the "zadrugar P-2" tractor with a diesel engine (until 1961, 10.000 such machines were produced).
Then in 1959, IMR signed a contract for the production of tractors with the Italian company "Landini" and started the production of the "zadrugar 50/I-landini" tractor, with a 50 hp engine. By 1968, 8000 such tractors were produced, followed by ten more popular "crab" models.
The conquest of tractor production in the countries of people's democracy from 1945 onwards was, by the way, no exception. After all, in the midst of the battle in Stalingrad, the Tractor Institute suffered the most. Czechoslovakia, for example, already in November 1945 started the production of the "zetor" tractor, in the development of which the best engineers from the then best Czechoslovak factory Zbrojovka from Brno were engaged.
According to the Statistical Yearbook of the SFRY from 1988, there were a total of 1951 tractors in the then FNRJ in 6000 (5000 in agricultural organizations and XNUMX with individual farmers). There were various brands, "alissa" with almost fused front wheels that start on the crank, "zetor" and all sorts of other brands.
If your chronicler's memory serves you well, one "zetor" with jointed wheels had iron wheels with large crampons, and the strongest impression was left by a noisy "bulldog", also with iron wheels, which on a winter's day were tractors of the Zem-cooperative, or was a machine - they tried to start tractor stations in sheepskin coats by heating some part of the tractor with a flashlight and turning the crank. "Come on kid, do you want to turn the crank?" Today's children would associate the word "bulldog" with a breed of dog, and those children of socialism with a tractor.
More modern models were arriving as well: according to a colleague's recollection of her father's stories, the first "Ferguson" brand tractors as part of British aid to the war-torn country arrived at the "Pannonia" agricultural estate near Subotica, which, well, was an event to be remembered.
WOODEN PLOW IN A RED TRACTOR: In that period, agricultural work was done with carts (horses and oxen, and in Šumadija cows whose milk dried up during plowing). The grain is harvested with sickles and scythes and only occasionally with a horse-drawn mower. The corn was hoeed three times, and covered, with flowers adorning the last hoe, in order to protect it from hail and drought.
In Snežana Radić's work "Officials of the Valjevo district 1944/47" it is described how in August 1946 the drought was so great that the springs and wells dried up in Podgorski srez in the Valjevo district. Yields were reduced by over 60 percent. Photos from that time show groups of young men and women covered with headscarves waiting at the train station to go on a corn picking campaign in Vojvodina.
Due to the agrarian reform and restrictions on land ownership, family cooperatives are divided and property is fragmented. Your chronicler's great-grandfather once got carried away and said, "Let me, my Đorđe, and our Rajko gather twenty crazy cans of corn." The redemption commission came and took everything away. Years later, grandfather regretted his bragging. There weren't even twelve buckets.
The first set task of the Valjevo Municipal Agricultural Department, the sowing of arable land with wheat, could not be accomplished due to the lack of labor and livestock for work. In addition, many agricultural machines and tools were destroyed during the war, and there was a lack of good craftsmen. From October 1944 to May 1945, the workers of the "Vistad" factory made 3000 "plain" plows, not only for the Valjevo region, but a part was sent to Macedonia, Montenegro, Metohija and Sandžak...
In the "Official Gazette of the SFRY" of August 22, 1947, along with numerous decisions on awards, one must note "Regulation No. 513 on the salaries of students and workers in tractor brigades at machine-tractor stations", signed by the Minister of Labor Vicko Krstulović and the Prime Minister FNRJ Marshal of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito.
In that decree, it is precisely stated that the tractor brigade consists of a foreman who, according to the decree, should be qualified to repair light mechanical works (in practice and have a positive characteristic), tractor drivers (permanent and seasonal), auxiliary tractor drivers, scribe-supplier, interns, students tractor drivers and, if necessary, hitchhikers (plows and other devices were then mostly pulled, not carried like on later types of tractors, so it took power to attach them to the tractor). The tractor operator's salary is set at 17 dinars per hour, which corresponds to the average salary of a civil servant at the time, and a supplement to the contract, based on performance, provided that the deviation of the norm does not affect quality. If there is no work due to bad weather or tractor failure, the tractor driver's salary is seven dinars per hour.
There were no trained personnel for mechanization in agricultural production. In Kragujevac, Zrenjanin, Zemun and other cities, courses were organized for brigadiers and managers of MT stations.
The technique was versatile and difficult to maintain. In the MT station Ruma, which worked on the territory of two sections with a radius of 25-35 km, after typification, the number of tractors was reduced from 79 to 45. According to the workers who worked at the station, better, stronger and newer tractors, such as " oliver 80" and "fordson", were shipped to Pančevački rit. The production task was reduced to 19.172 conditional mornings. But even so, since the "lantz bulldog" tractors received were faulty and underpowered, the station was unable to complete production tasks. In addition, labor costs were higher... According to the new production plan, the station had to process 18.762 conditional cadastral acres, and the plan was achieved with 81 percent due to bad weather conditions and weak tractors. In particular, it failed in plowing at 20 cm, clearing meadows, peeling stubble, spreading mineral fertilizer, harrowing, discing, plowing at 25 cm, due to the lack of spare parts, threshing with tractors, threshing with steam locomotives and threshing sunflowers. The failure in the destruction of meadows and the spreading of mineral fertilizers occurred because there were no clients who would ask for this type of service.
It was a time of dots, compulsory redemption, confiscation of war profits, confiscation of land from the kulaks, from the time when a man from Valjevac was sentenced for feeding pigs with corn "belonging to the working class".
The average yields of agricultural crops in those forties of the 20th century were extremely low, for example, the yield of wheat was about 1 t/ha, corn 1,4 t/ha.
As part of the agrarian reform of 1945, as Snežana Radić writes in her monograph "State officials of the Valjevo district 1941/45", in the Valjevo district over 5500 ha were taken from the owners of land holdings, which were distributed to around 3300 landless people. Aleksi Aleksić from Sovljak (Ub) was deprived of more than 150 ha, cooperative Popović from Jabučje (Ub) - was left without 146 ha, Radovanović Radomir from Krčmar (Mionica) - without 99 ha...
In 1945, statistics recorded 316.415 beneficiaries of the agrarian reform in 1945. Among them were 42.582 families of federal colonists who moved to Vojvodina from passive and war-ravaged regions. The number of beneficiaries of the agrarian reform is, by the way, smaller than from 1919-1933. when Beg's land in Bosnia and Herzegovina and large estates in the northern regions were divided among the peasants who cultivate it. There were 518.400 of them.
Something similar to what happened in Prince Miloš's Serbia took place, when a small property was protected by the stipulation that one could not sell the house, garden and land for two days of plowing.
This led to fragmentation of possessions for socio-political reasons. At the same time, due to the necessity of increasing agricultural production, in order to feed the population, at that time the concentration of arable land begins with the formation of state agricultural assets.
Especially after the conflict with the IB, probably to prove their orthodoxy, or because of the belief that more food will be produced under state control, the government pushes individual farmers into peasant labor cooperatives with quite a bit of violence, although not as much as in the USSR during collectivization. There were 1945 peasant labor cooperatives in the FNRJ in 14, and in 1949 there were 6913 of them, but in 1954 their number fell to 896, and in 1966 to seven.
Those peasant labor cooperatives should be distinguished from later formed agricultural cooperatives, of which there were over a million between 1963 and 1968 and between 1982 and 1987, while in other years their number dropped to 600.000.
Those cooperatives had machinery, which they used to service their own agricultural land and their subcontractors. In 1963, those cooperatives plowed 1.120.000 hectares owned by their individual farmers, provided threshing, harvesting, etc. services.
Those new socialist agricultural cooperatives relied from afar on the tradition of pre-war agricultural cooperatives, credit cooperatives, grain cooperatives, livestock cooperatives, etc.
The first agricultural credit cooperative in the territory of central Serbia was founded in Vranovo in 1894, and by the First World War, 782 cooperatives with over 100.000 members had been founded. In 1937, 3674 cooperatives were registered.
They were the channel for the technological transformation of the village. And ideological. When our pioneering tractor venture began, there was a poem in the reading books: "Look, look, dear friends, what people have invented, and without a horse, and without a man, that machine plows alone..." Then came a parody of some verses by Mira Alečković "Where there was a wooden plow, now a red tractor is plowing and driven by a tractor driver, a member of the League of Communists!"
From the new cooperatives, agricultural producers also received loans - which they repaid with goods, constantly complaining about the disparity in prices - with which they independently bought machinery and provided each other with services with that machinery. Around 1968, the number of tractors in social and individual ownership was equalized.
ZAR: For that cooperative social-economic network, the tractor industry was targeted, the largest plant of which, based on the state decision, was in the former "Aleksandar Ranković" Institute, formed earlier by a decision signed by the Prime Minister of Serbia, Petar Stambolić, on February 15, 1947, ordering that into a new institute, which will be managed by the Main Directorate of Metal Industry, the Main Foundry, the Tool Manufacturing Factory, the Electrical Materials Factory (until 1950 called ELIP) and one company which is called "Combined" in the solution. That was before the beginning of the post-war construction of New Belgrade in April 1948, behind the old airport, there used to be an industrial track of the railway from Zemun, whose train station was near the current Jugoslavia Hotel.
The reason for merging into one institute: optimization of production, reduction of overhead costs and joint procurement of raw materials and semi-finished products. The task of the factory was to produce sanitary castings, electrical equipment and devices for the chemical and food industry. The tractor is not mentioned then. Its production will begin in new circumstances, after the break with IB, in the atmosphere of sanctions from the east and opening to the west.
The start of production of the popular "Ferguson" was preceded by research at the Federal Institute for Agricultural Mechanization in Belgrade, founded in late 1946. The suitability for domestic conditions of several types of tractors was tested, among which were: "farmal-A" wheeled tractor and "don caster" (38 hp) of the American company International harvester, engine power 13,5 hp (9,94 kilowatts - kW), then the Michigan "Ford" (38 hp); and tractors of the German brand "allgaier" (33 HP); MAN (30 HP); "deutz" (30 hp); "fahr" (30 HP); "neuss IHC" (25 HP); "lanz bulldog" (28 HP); "Daimler - Benz - Unimog" (25 HP); English brands - "Ferguson" (25 HP); "David Brown" (29 HP); "Naffield" (36 HP); French "dizier" (24 HP); "renault" (32 HP); Austrian "steyr" (30 hp) and Italian "fiat das" (25 hp).
After two years of comparative testing of tractors, the Institute for Agricultural Mechanization - Zemun Polje, and based on the results obtained, in a report to the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Serbia recommends that, considering the quality of the machine and the local conditions, the license for the production of tractors should be purchased from the company "Ferguson" and the state is purchased the license and entrusted production to the ZAR factory, "Aleksandar Ranković" Institute.
That factory was enlarged and reconstructed little by little, so that after the third reconstruction it would be capable of serial production of 10.000 IMT-575 tractors. During the fourth reconstruction in 1976, a new tractor factory was built with a production capacity of 40.000 tractors per year, and in 1982, another new tractor factory with a 75 kW engine power of classic and articulated construction, with a capacity of 2000 tractors per year, was put into operation.
IMT produced 29 types with engine power from 20 kW to 380 kW. Engine power increased 19,3 times, and mass from 1540 kg to 20.000 kg, or 13 times. The IMT-550 tractor of its own articulated construction with a 380 kW "Mercedes" engine, with 16 gears, was intended for large agricultural combines for heavy work, for example, plowing with a plow of 8,10 and 12 plow bodies, a disc of 8-9 m it covers other works as well.
Acquiring these new license-based products was not without its struggles. There were complaints about the quality of the cast, and more within the framework of the now hard-to-understand frictions regarding the implementation of the Law on Joint Labor, and "income relations". Some parts of the factory, which were then called Basic Organizations of Associated Labor, showed a desire for autochthonousness, some complained that they were being exploited.
Everyone was looking for salaries and loans to work. From the committee they constantly ran to IMT, if memory serves, most often to IMT's Casting Factory, which poured engine blocks, was a polluter in the city center, which had "income and technological problems". An activist was pelted there with bags of foundry sand when he went to convince them of something in the late eighties. Basically, the workers were gullible and easily subject to manipulation.
Still, a kind of industrial pride grew. As Dragoljub Obradović, Predrag Petrović, Zoran Dumanović and Branka Kresović stated in the study "Chronology and development trend of tractor production in Serbia", a few years ago, the tractor production industry in Serbia at the time of its rise was technically at the level of tractor production in companies from which licenses were purchased.
Before the transition breakdown in Serbia, there were several, for the conditions of the former state, large production systems for the production of agricultural machinery. They dominantly supplied machinery to farmers, i.e. the SFRY market: Zmaj - Zemun (which disappeared during the privatization of 2,000), IMT - Novi Beograd (which is now going bankrupt), IMR - Rakovica, Lifam - Stara Pazova, Majevica - Bačka Palanka...
In 1988, IMR produced 42.000 tractors and 35.000 machines, worth over 600 million marks. The tractor enters the folk song.
I'm a country guy
and country boy
I don't have a good car
and I have a tractor...
I drive the tractor because she likes it
shake it, tremble because she loves him
no ride without mine 'ferguson's...
Attachment machines, vegetable and garden machinery were produced by IMT FOP - Bečej, IMT - Knjaževac (which was sold in bankruptcy), Morava - Požarevac, Metalogradnja - Vrbas and others. In Slovenia, under Fiat's license, the "store" tractor was produced for several years, and the "steyr" tractor was produced in Osjek. The last tractor tested at the Zemun Institute was the "Torpedo RX-1989" tractor produced in Rijeka in 170.
In the Rakovica Engine Industry, the maximum production was in 1989, 6427 tractors. The Rakovica engine industry seemed to be in the background then, the center of attention was the development of the production of small car engines in the 21st century. May", created from the Small Engine Factory established in 1948, for the purpose of repairing - again - aircraft engines...
Today's production of engines and tractors in the Rakovica Motor Industry has been decimated, but it is still being maintained in that company during restructuring.
WORK TASK: The public was able to find out that IMR is still working in restructuring, when on May 28 they blocked the tracks of tram line number 3 and Ulica Patrijarha Dimitrija, and brought a tractor to the barricades to show what Rakovica Motor Industry can produce...
"WHEN THE CRAB RISES...": In 1989, when the system began to crack, like hardened steel, after Borov workers from Vukovar came to Belgrade on July 5, 1988, with the slogans "Salaries, loans, production" and a column of workers started from Rakovica. As Pavluško Imširović later said at a panel of the "Republika" newspaper: "Rakovica is blocked, a state of war, and the IMT is blocked... In the end, they cashed them to calm them down, to stop them, and promised hills and valleys, like it always goes, just to stop them. But these people don't know that. I don't know either. They trust only in their own attitude, there are about 7000 of them who came that morning... When they went inside (in the Federal Assembly of SFRY), I asked them: do you know what you did? This is the highest authority in the country. It is a symbol, there is no more power than the Federal Assembly. It doesn't matter who the commander-in-chief is, this is the highest legislative power, won like this. They laugh and say: "The day after tomorrow we will celebrate the 7th Serbian Day of Fighters here... We will celebrate it here, and then we will go around Belgrade to see where those Serbian fighters are and who they will be." Because we don't have Serbs and Croats, I don't know what my colleague is, nor does he know, nor do I care... In the evening, the head of the federal union came from the federal government, he was a Croat, and brought written messages that all their demands would be met: salaries cashed out, idle money, loans for production, because production was stopped, they no longer had money for raw materials, working capital. All requests. Then they picked themselves up and left..."
Milan Nikolić, engineer of work organization in the factory "21. maj" in Rakovica, a trade union activist, said at the time: "I brought them. But someone broke the concept of Rakovica, because it took the workers out of the working class. They simply opened the gate and went out. There is no decision to do so. Someone made a decision and I was just faced with what to do. I went out in front of people on the street. We have reached the IMR. The workers started jumping over the fence, the crowd grew, and the workers shouted 'for Belgrade'. And so I was at the head of the convoy to Belgrade. Along the way, the director of IMR offered his workers a XNUMX% salary increase, but they refused. When we got to Zvezda, some Serbian politicians came to join us, but the workers did not allow anyone to approach. The column was from London to Mostar. (The next day, 'Rekord' was released, whose employees the director at the time, Dragan Tomić, did not allow to go with us to Belgrade.) No one appeared in front of the Assembly for two hours. Then one wing among us, I don't know if they were inserted, started shouting 'we want Sloba'. He was obviously waiting and ran from the Post Office building as soon as he heard 'we want Sloba'.
Milošević ended his speech with the words 'And now everyone to their work assignments'. However, I finished the chorus. I said that we will go about our tasks, but that we will control the leadership. A month after that, Milosevic came to Rakovica and completely won over the workers. It was like a god coming down to earth. The public has the impression that the workers came out to support national ideas. People came out for wages, and they got wages…”
Sociologist Nebojša Popov concluded in the nineties that those from Rakovica came to the Assembly as workers, and left the Assembly as Serbs...
Since then, two and a half decades of agony have passed, during which month after month it will be shown that their mission is complete, their experience written off, and their customers crippled.
OLD PEOPLE AND OLD TRACTORS: Can it be said at the end of the story that it was painted for nothing? In 1951, one tractor came to 468 hectares in agricultural organizations, and when it comes to individual farms, one tractor to 7332 ha. A comparison with 1987, when one tractor came on 49 hectares of land, and on individual farms one tractor on 13 hectares, shows the kind of technological transformation. In the Republic of Serbia, one two-axle tractor is now used for every 8,5 ha of agricultural land.
Prof. Dr. Dušan Radivojević states that there are 410.894 two-axle and 186.922 single-axle tractors in the Republic of Serbia, which means that every other farm in Serbia has its own two-axle tractor, that universal machine for agricultural work, transport, towing, etc.
Does this data indicate that the domestic tractor market is oversaturated? Rather, it will be that the market was destroyed in parallel with the decline of those factories.
Among the prophetic newly composed songs about the tractor is this one:
I drink wine and hot brandy and I don't think about the tractor and the house...
And that's how it turned out.
In the transition period, cooperatives are slowly closing down, their number is decreasing, because they were privatized or failed due to over-indebtedness, and later their remaining property was given to the Republic Directorate for Property.
The SANU commission for the countryside warned that far-reaching, tragic degradation, aging and demographic emptying of the countryside are at work. The area of arable land in 2003 was almost ten percent smaller compared to 1955 ("Statistical Yearbook" 2003), and in 2012, compared to 2003, this trend of reduction was even more pronounced and amounted to around 20 percent.
The area of arable - used land in the Republic of Serbia is constantly decreasing due to the increasing use of land for other purposes due to erosion, deterioration due to inadequate maintenance and use, or due to the deterioration of atar roads that new mechanization could not pass, and small plots unfavorable for cultivation.
According to the analysis of the professor of the Faculty of Agriculture, Miladin Ševarlić, the 2012 Census of Agriculture for the first time revealed two very worrying facts in the existing public databases on land resources: (1) total agricultural land (3.861.477 ha) is less than half (49,8 percent) ) of the total territory of Serbia (77.592 square km). As much as 424.054 ha or 11 percent, or every ninth hectare of the total agricultural land, or every 18th hectare of the total territory of Serbia, is not used as agricultural land.
On the other hand, the state of agricultural mechanization in Serbia has become very critical when it comes to further agricultural production.
The purchase of domestic machinery is not only not seriously supported by the economic measures of the Serbian state, but it is also not supported by banks.
The joke about Comrade Khrushchev's visit to the collective farms was realized with black humor in reality. In the first, he says: "Your chickens are beautiful, what do you feed them!" "Wheat, Comrade Khrushchev!" "Not wheat, for God's sake, wheat costs 16 kopecks a kilogram." They told the next kolkhoz not to mention wheat and they answered the same question answers: "With corn, Comrade Khrushchev", the latter says that corn is 15 kopecks, and so on, until the last answer reads: "Let's give them 14 kopecks, so let eat what they want...
The social and economic support networks that enabled the peasants to acquire and restore their equipment on credit were broken. Most of the peasants are not creditworthy, they do not have the previous support of the cooperatives, which they complained about because of the price discrepancy and uncertainty. Due to low purchasing power, most farmers in Serbia still rely on old machines bought in the period before the sanctions.
The purchase of domestically produced driving and attachment machines was almost symbolic even though, in terms of price criteria, and to a large extent in terms of quality, it met the needs of farmers, especially for use on small holdings that dominate Serbian agriculture. They don't have the money to participate, and they are not sure that they will be old enough to be able to repay the installments. Used tractors are offered online and sold at fairs. A farmer at the fair in Ruma declares to TV Vojvodina: "This is my third fair. There is no buyer for my used tractor."
The market has revived, that is, the import of used machines from abroad, and only a small number of farmers have the strength and ability to take out loans and renew machinery by purchasing new imported driving and attachment machines. Domestic production systems have been economically destroyed, so the market is open for foreign manufacturers of agricultural machinery.
Agricultural analyzes from Macedonia say the same thing.
Prof. Dr. Dušan Radivojević in the RSZ study on agricultural mechanization, equipment and facilities states that about 1.000.000 energy units, 2.500.000 connected machines and tools and over 100.000 units of process technology and thermotechnics are used to cultivate agricultural land in Serbia. age from 15 to 30 years, as many as 95 percent of the tractors are, however, older than ten years. About 98 percent of those machines are used, in one way or another, for an average of about 705 hours a year. According to the technicians, the life of the tractor is 16.000 to 20.000 working hours before a general overhaul.
Data on the ownership of tractors and land and the difference in technological efficiency, when crossed, speak in their own way about the stratification and economic devastation of the countryside.
When it comes to farms with agricultural land over 50 ha, these are the few categories of peasants who may be able to renew their agricultural techniques. There are 5608 of them in Serbia, and they own about 14.000 tractors. Farms with more than 15 hectares held 1991 percent of arable land in Serbia in 5,5, 2002 percent in 12,2, and more than 2012 percent in 32. In the category of farms with more than 20 ha, in 2008 there were only 8716 tractors (2,81 percent), and that number grew to 40.430 (9,98 percent) in 2012. This could lead to a conclusion about a more rational use of machines.
Even in Slovenia, which has fewer transition traumas than Serbia, it is estimated that out of 60.000 households, around 20.000-25.000 are investment-capable, and the renewal of the machine park does not exceed one percent per year.
For the rest, it can be said that they function according to the principle of "the rag keeps the house".
According to data from the census documentation in 2012, in Serbia, 478.304 agricultural holdings with up to 5 ha of agricultural land have 220.505 two-axle tractors.
The number of farms that own areas of less than 2 ha is increasing, and therefore there is a significant increase in the number of tractors owned by that category. You can see from the ads that their used tractors are only worth a few thousand euros.
According to data from census documentation in 2012, there are 9486 farms in Serbia that do not have agricultural land. Those farms have around 1000 tractors.
The economic (price) exhaustion of agriculture during the period of sanctions and civil wars made it impossible to restore agricultural mechanization in most farms. Compared to 2001, the number of tractors in 2012 was 22 percent lower.
CENSUS AND DELETE COMMISSION: The disintegration of the former state and international isolation had a decisive effect on the volume of production and sale of agricultural machinery for all manufacturers, which led them to extreme economic difficulties. Privatization then completely shut down production in most agricultural machinery factories (Zmaj, Lifam, Metalogradnja...) or that production was minimized (IMT, IMR, Majevica, Morava, Poljostroj...)
Admittedly, a larger number of smaller manufacturers or assemblers of agricultural, especially attachment machines (Berko - Mol, Gitarić - Smederevska Palanka, Gumaplast Rau - Vojka and others) emerged, but this is far from the earlier industries.
In developed countries, there was no abandonment of tractor production.
With approximately 4500 companies and 135.000 employees, the agricultural machinery industry in Western Europe is one of the largest in the field of mechanical engineering. Germany, Italy and France, measured by the number of tractors sold, hold 20 percent of the world tractor market and 77 percent of the European market. Given that these are high-performance tractors, their share in sales is significantly higher. Italy sells machinery for soil cultivation worth 520 million euros. In 2005, more than one fifth of the total export of this type of equipment from Germany was to Central and Eastern Europe. However, it is still at a low level when compared to Western European countries of similar size. In Poland, only 9000 tractors were sold in 2004.
Without a strategy and plan, customs protection for domestic production was abolished, credit support dried up, and domestic producers are exposed to fierce competition from imports (tractors from Belarus and Brasov in Romania are also entering). In such conditions, some earlier manufacturers of agricultural machinery (IMT, IMR, Majevica, Morava, Poljostroj...) were maintained in such conditions until now. The debt of those factories, above all to the state, grew while waiting and announcing that the "cavalry" of the "strategic partner" would come down ", while various emissaries visited the halls, looked and left without responding with a letter or a postcard.
IMT sale agreement dated April 10, 2008, which mentions the Consortium as the buyer HASS SIP, Swiss Home & Art Sales service AG and the Slovenian Strojna industrija dd, failed because the bidders gave up due to the lack of bank support, and in that context MPC, Cepter, etc. were mentioned.
In December 2014, it was mentioned that he was interested in IMT and IMR China National Electric Engineering Technology Co. Some mentioned that an Indian company was interested in buying IMT Tea.
Former minister Goran Knežević said that the state would help revive tractor production before he was fired because of aflatoxin. The new prosperity was also announced by the president of the IMR Board of Directors, Bane Ivković. There was talk of unification so that part of IMT's property, on an area of 36 hectares in New Belgrade, would be sold and that these funds would be spent on investments and the application of new technologies, and that tractor production should be moved to Barič or Dobanovce. While he was a minister, Mlađan Dinkić advocated this idea by talking about turning the land on which those factories are located into construction land, about building a factory where the American tractor "John Deere" would be produced.
A John Deere tractor is exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington as a symbol of American entrepreneurship and pioneering spirit.
In our country too, the tractor played a transforming role, but as a symbol it now speaks more of a strategic breakdown than of progress. In addition, we no longer have respect for that type of entrepreneurship, now the cards are being thrown that the price of construction land will take us out. There were at least twelve valuations in the media, and one headline read that those 36 hectares are worth half of NIS...
The fate of IMT is part of a wider picture in which the industry of the Republic of Serbia in 2012, according to official statistical data, was at a level of only 38,4 percent of the level of industrial production in 1989. Such deindustrialization until 2012 was not recorded in any European country after the Second World War.
In the rearview mirror of the old tractor, one can see that the heirs, mostly fit for membership in the census and write-off commission, did not know what to do with either industry or agriculture, nor with the science that once accompanied them.
