Agricultural investment in the 1971-75 period was planned at about 2.7 billion leva. This sum constitutes only 13.5 percent of the total planned investment and implies the maintenance of annual agricultural investment at the level of 1970. It also reflects the continued underinvestment in agriculture in favor of industry, despite the grandiose, plans for agricultural transformation, considering that agriculture contributed 22 percent of the national income in 1970. In that year a Soviet economist observed that the small proportion of national resources allotted to agriculture in the past was responsible for the slow growth of that important economic sector and that the increase in the mechanization of farms was not sufficient to offset the loss of manpower. The leadership's policy of placing agriculture on an industrial footing and mechanizing production demands increased investment in machinery and other physical facilities. The low investment decreed for the 1971-75 period is not in keeping with that policy. A national conference on construction in agriculture, convened in the spring of 1972, was devoted to the study of shortcomings in capital construction. The underlying causes of unsatisfactory performance were analyzed, and persons responsible for the failures were identified. The findings of the conference were not published, but an account of the conference contained references to inadequate project planning, poor design, acceptance of inferior equipment, delays in the completion of construction, and cost overruns. A sympathetic foreign observer noted a disproportionately large allocation of investment funds to building construction compared with the funds allotted for farm machinery. Mechanization At the beginning of 1971 Bulgarian agriculture possessed about 53,600 tractors with a total of 1.4 million horsepower--the equivalent of about sixteen horsepower per 100 acres of plowed land. The horsepower of the tractor inventory increased by 2.3 times after 1960, but a portion of that increase was offset by the loss of more than 358,000 horses and buffalo. In 1970 Bulgaria had more tractor power per acre than any other Eastern European communist country except Czechoslovakia and more horses per acre than any of these countries with the exception of Hungary, which had a slightly larger number. Grain combines on farms numbered 9,340, or 2.4 combines for each 1,000 acres of grain crops. In this regard Bulgaria ranked above the Soviet Union and at the average of the other Eastern European communist countries. Nevertheless, according to the minister of agriculture, only about 50 percent of the labor in wheat production was mechanized in 1972, even though wheat production was considered to be the most highly mechanized branch of agriculture. In other production branches the level of mechanization was extremely low.