The article gives the author's definition of "main crops" and carries out a comparative analysis of their production in farms of all categories for 2016-2020. It is noted that when cultivating main crops in the country, a significant role is given to foreign technological resources and, above all, seeds. The dynamics of the import of crop seeds into the Russian Federation (according to the Federal Customs Service of Russia) was studied and appropriate conclusions were made on the degree of localization of their production in the country. The main problems in the current state of domestic breeding and seed production were revealed, which were taken into account when working out issues of legislative and regulatory support. The conceptual model of breeding, seed production and seed science of agricultural crops in the country is presented and the role of the Ministry of Agriculture of Russia for monitoring the production of reproductive seeds is shown. The directions of breeding and seed production development on the basis of improvement of regulatory and legal support and, above all, the draft law "On seed production" are considered. The need to legally ensure the protection of property rights of breeding and seed-growing centers and their experimental farms in terms of land use is justified, as well as to determine the powers of the executive authorities to develop a mechanism for the allocation of special seed-growing zones for the purpose of their spatial isolation. A set of organizational and economic measures for the development of breeding, seed production and seed science of crops in the country has been developed and proposed.
The article deals with the development of industrial horticulture in the North Caucasus, where, due to favourable natural and climatic conditions, the industry is of key importance for agriculture. The features of the current state of horticulture are noted: high dynamic rate of development, wide introduction of advanced technologies, and implementation of large innovation and investment projects. In 2015-2020, the total area of fruit and berry plantations increased by 12.3%, in the fruiting age – by 8.1%, and the volume of fruit and berry production increased by 74.3%. It is established that almost all the subjects included in the analyzed region are leaders in Russia in terms of gross collections and laying areas, and intensive gardening is highlighted here as a priority direction. It is established that in some regions, personal subsidiary farms still play an important role in production. The strategic directions determining the economic positions of horticulture are noted: state support, improvement of the qualifications of industry workers, introduction of advanced practices and cultivation technologies, development of breeding and nursery centers, development of market infrastructure. The obtained research results can be used to develop a program for the development of horticulture in the North Caucasus.
Rural areas play an important role in the socio-economic processes of the country. Their uneven development in Russia is one of the key problems in the state strategy. The remoteness and expansiveness of rural areas can and should be balanced by their integration into the digital economy, which provides for a single information and communication space. Digital rural areas are primarily covered by the entire territory by the Internet, which is already a powerful resource for obtaining state, educational, medical services, and the ability to conduct electronic commerce for villagers. This removes the main social problems of their accessibility. To this end, it is necessary to determine the essence of sustainable rural development in conditions of digitalization, the basic principles of sustainable development, to formulate the main necessary components of the content of the concept of "sustainable rural development" from the point of view of the development of the information and communication structure and their integration into the global digital landscape. This approach makes it possible to diversify economic activities in rural areas, an additional impetus to achieve economic prosperity and, at the same time, preserve the natural and climatic balance. Also, using digital technology residents get the opportunity to carry out activities that are not related to agriculture, thereby increasing the social significance and attractiveness of the territories.
The increase in the intensity of agricultural land use and the increase in the area of reclaimed land in the Leningrad Region in recent years may contribute to a potential increase in the removal of biogens with groundwater from drainage systems. In conditions of limited state support, it is possible to finance priority environmental investment projects on the basis of public-private partnership, which will help to strengthen the interest of investors to participate in regionally significant socio-environmental projects and increase attention to the problems of water resources management in rural areas. In order to reduce the eutrophication processes, we calculated the cost of applying environmental measures –the construction of a wetland, the creation of intelligent buffer zones, liming, using the example of an experimental field in the v. Menkovo, Gatchinsky district of the Leningrad region. The introduction of measures to reduce the concentration of nutrients in the drains entering the drainage increases the cost of reconstruction and construction of reclamation facilities by 4.0-15.0%, which will require an increase in the share of subsidies from the state. It is necessary to reorient the state land reclamation program to allocate support primarily for those farmers and agricultural organizations that will be ready to implement filtering and trapping systems. The development of a modified methodology for assessing the quality of agricultural producers 'activities, using a parameter that characterizes the level of environmental ethics and aggressiveness of functioning, consistent with individual indicators of regional statistics, will help identify the recipients of "green" subsidies. Also, the creation of public maps based on digital data in combination with other socio-economic indicators (the density of the rural population, the average size of the farm) will allow for the correct distribution of efforts to combat sources of water pollution in rural areas of the Leningrad region.
The rural territories of Russia have been the leading pillar of the agricultural sector for centuries. However, the situation has changed dramatically in recent years. The rural population decreases annually, villages disappear, and farms themselves lose their sources of profit. In order to localize the destructive process, a new approach to rural development is needed, involving the introduction of the concept of sustainable rural development, the promotion of entrepreneurial activity and the diversification of rural employment. The development of rural territories of the Russian Federation is characterized by simultaneous quantitative and qualitative imbalance in social, economic, administrative-legal, technical-industrial, environmental, cultural, and scientific and many other areas. The article examined a number of features characteristic of rural territories in Russia, revealed factors that negatively affect their development, as well as identified areas that can create competitive conditions and improve the quality of life of the rural population. The building block in the concept of rural development policy is the competitiveness of rural areas, the development of local initiatives, the use of resources that have not previously been used, and the main areas of socio-economic development of various sectors are the intensification of entrepreneurship. In order to ensure a high level of competitiveness of rural areas, the formation of their potential (economic, resource, personnel, marketing, production, innovation, entrepreneurial, etc.) is of particular importance.
The article examines the impact of agrarian policies, including rural development policies, on the encouragement of rural employment. The analysis includes measures of state support implemented at the federal level since 2006. In addition to agrarian policy instruments directly aimed at the development of employment - in agriculture or in the non-agrarian sector of the rural economy, the impact of non-targeted support measures for the labor market is considered. This is a large part of agricultural subsidies and general services support. In addition, the main measures of employment support under national programs are considered from the point of view of their impact on the rural labor market. Given the inevitable decline in the number of people employed in agriculture, the main focus of the study and recommendations is on non-agricultural rural employment. The proposed directions for agricultural policy adjustment assume that public investment in education, quality infrastructure, and market structures are key determinants of the ability to develop the non-agrarian sector of the rural economy and related employment. Therefore, the formation of framework conditions and general services support are considered as more priority forms of state influence in comparison with highly specialized targeted support of certain perspective types of economic activity in rural areas - tourism, collection and processing of wild-growing products, production of building materials, etc. In this sense, the shift in the vector of regional policy from top-down directive centralized distribution of funds to co-financing of local initiatives, enshrined in the State Program "Integrated Development of Rural Areas", is the most significant change in agricultural policy in recent years.
The purpose of this study is an assessment of the current situation in the field of managing the economic growth of agriculture in Russia using the developed methodology "Agrarian Growth Pyramid". The author substantiates the position that the achieved growth in agriculture does not correspond to the country's agricultural potential, it is ambiguous and cannot be fully recognized as economic. Taking into account the current trends in social development and the specifics of the industry, the study applied a new approach to the decomposition of the economic growth of agriculture as part of traditional quantitative and qualitative, and newly introduced generating changes in its state, which makes it possible to take into account all aspects of agricultural dynamics and increase the level of adequacy of its assessment. It is proposed to measure the economic growth of agriculture using a complex indicator visualized using a pyramid, which takes into account not only the parameters of the level and growth rate widely used in practice, but also the state of its base formed as a result of agricultural dynamics. The construction of pyramids and the assessment of the structure of economic growth in agriculture in Russia were carried out in a comparative format with the results achieved in the agricultural economies of the USA, Canada, Germany, and Kazakhstan in the period 2000-2020. The findings of the study indicate that there is a contradiction between the growth of agricultural production in Russia and the lack of the necessary conditions for reproduction in the industry; also there is a significant gap in the level and content of the economic growth of agriculture in Russia and developed countries with a similar agricultural potential; it has been detected the errors in the management of the processes of economic dynamics in the country's agriculture, which determines the main limitations of agricultural growth.
The functioning of agricultural production, more than any other branch of the national economy, is determined by space and time, which causes the need for zoning of territories, since this determines the rental opportunities for the use of land, fixed and variable capital, and the market. The article reveals the problems of spatial development of the rural economy of the priority territories of the country in the context of strategic macroeconomic management. In this regard, a wide range of issues related to the territorial organization of productive forces is considered, with the allocation of the primary link of the spatial economy – "locality", and the largest – "agglomeration". Based on the regional heterogeneity of the agrarian economy, the main theoretical and methodological directions of spatial development of agriculture in geostrategic territories are substantiated, using the example of the North Caucasus Federal District (NCFD). This will make it possible to develop strategic institutional and regulatory documents to influence the process of spatial development of the North Caucasian rural economy, the development of which has not yet reached even the pre-reform level due to non-adaptive macroeconomic policy. The latter led to the deindustrialization of the rural economy of the North Caucasus Federal District, associated with the introduction of an unregulated spontaneous market, private, especially land ownership with the purchase and sale of the main means of agricultural production, alienating it from land use, contrary to the age-old foundations of the multinational North Caucasian peoples, who believed that the land was nobody's, but only God's. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a non-standard, comprehensively balanced, traditional and modern working and living conditions of numerous peoples of the North Caucasus – a new breakthrough macroeconomic strategy for the spatial development of these territories, taking into account their border location, based on a combination of planning and the market, in other words, a model of a planned market economy. Then the opportunities for the development of the productive forces of the North Caucasian village and other sectors of the economy will open up, the severity of the most important problem – unemployment, crime, terrorist attempts will decrease, because socio-economic messages will disappear for this.
The trends that are beginning to dominate the global economy are associated with the ubiquitous use of digital technology. Many countries hope to solve the problem of food supply of the population by using these technologies. The uniqueness and importance of such technologies lies in the fact that their use leads to fundamental shifts, since they affect the basic basis and areas of activity of not only direct participants in the production process, but also related ones, introducing cardinal transformations into their activities. In the agricultural production of most regions of the country (including the subjects of the investigated district), small forms of management are dominant, more than half of the products are produced by these formations. A feature of these types of management is their small commodity. In the looming conditions, the small-scale commodity model cannot be the main form of conducting agro-industrial production due to the fact that its carriers (in the form of existence) cannot single-handedly acquire and use digital technologies, because of their high cost and inaccessibility, as well as because of tougher competition. The main players are large producers and networkers in the external and internal markets of agri-food. The need to update the technological basis of the production process based on the use (implementation) of information and digital technologies will also play a role. To eliminate these problems and at the same time remain competitive, small businesses must unite and concentrate their resources to acquire the necessary technologies and confront threats. The task is to find an optimal solution that would preserve agricultural organizations, peasant (farmer) households, and households, but at the same time they would be reorganized. The article proposes various forms of institutional transformations that will allow small businesses to adapt to emerging conditions.
Currently in the agrarian sphere are only some elements of innovation infrastructure, the activity of which is being implemented in areas such as consulting and analytical, technical services, mediation, training and retraining. There are the following directions of scientific and innovation infrastructure (technological, consulting, financing, preparation of personnel, information and infrastructure market. The most developing branches of the following elements of innovation infrastructure: technology parks, innovation and technological centers, innovative-industrial complexes, and in recent years - technological development zones and technology platforms, clusters. A promising form of innovative development in agriculture are economic societies with the intellectual property created at universities for the promotion of the objects of intellectual property on the market of scientific and technical products. As this type of business has a high level of risk and, however, can have a significant impact on the innovation development, selection and promotion of the most promising young researchers, a number of issues of social development, it is expedient to provide for measures of the state public support for these innovative enterprises.