Conceptually, farm consumption in kind is the value of farm products retained by the grower for his own consumption. Farm products retained for production purposes (for seed and animal fodder) are excluded. A great deal of data on gross and net output of grains, supplied by a number of agencies, the most important being the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the zemstvo statistical committees, make the estimation of grain marketings and consumption in kind possible with (I believe) a reasonable degree of accuracy. Considerable controversy still surrounds tsarist agricultural statistics, and a vast literature (prerevolutionary, early Soviet period, and contemporary) exists on this subject. The most important issue raised by this literature is whether a substantial upward adjustment of the official Central Statistical Committee figures is needed. The accumulation of vast data on grain output, transport, and consumption is explained by the importance of agricultural marketings as a major instrument of tax collections, international payments policy, and by the persistent threat of famine.

Farm consumption in kind can be estimated according to two alternate methods: The first, used by Prokopovich for his 1900 and 1913 estimates and by Bergson for the later Soviet period, is the residual method, whereby agricultural marketings other than intravillage sales are subtracted from net agricultural output (gross output minus seed and feed for own animals). The residual represents farm consumption in kind.