This contribution seeks to compare the different preconditions and historical dynamics of socialist agriculture in two adjacent regions (northwest Poland and northeast Germany), along with the ways socialist agriculture is remem-bered and valorized nowadays. Based on interviews and written sources on agricultural history, the author sketches out divergent trajectories of sovkho-ism. Comparing the two cases, the author examines how skill, spatial distance between farmhands and managers in a setting of mutual connivance, and ideas about land ownership shaped local varieties of give-and-take, and ultimately, how they informed memories about socialist agriculture.