Virgin Land Campaign

During Soviet rule under Nikita Khrushchev, he opened up an area of land that was called the virgin lands. These lands were Steppes in Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. At the first harvest, the virgin lands were a success. They grew wheat and produced twice as much wheat than the Western world did in 1956. However these lands started to lack sufficient nutrients for the wheat since all of the nutrients were taken out of the soil. Eventually the virgin lands program failed in 1965 and the USSR was forced to buy 20 million tons of wheat from Canada to avoid famine.