The position of agriculture in kibbutz economy—an attempt at quantitative projection

The Israeli Kibbutz Movement adopted the ideology of the “Return to Nature” and aspired to especially develop agricultural labour. But in the past decade there has been a process of “internal migration” of workers from agriculture to industrial occupations, which was compared to the “Industrial Revolution”. The ratio of agricultural workdays to other productive branches workdays decline from 62% in 1967 to 46.5% in 1974. Kibbutz' management has many reasons to evaluate its future direction, (investment in land, in education, etc.). We shall try to describe the expected developments, using the Markov chain. We shall also try to analyse the yearly interchanges and transfer from agriculture to industry and vice versa. We shall attempt to show that the process of decreasing agricultural manpower has almost ceased, and it will become stable on a fixed level of about 43%.