The pace of change in agriculture is determined mainly by the application of knowledge and technological modernization within the sector. Improvement rests on skill levels and industrial advancement; but technologies used are also affected by the terms of trade, determining whether producers can afford new machinery. Technological diffusion in agriculture depends, further, on the strength of capital and labor markets in rural areas to help integrate more isolated communities with the knowledge-based farming systems of the more advanced core. Knowledge transfer from research scientists to the village was the critical constraint in the technological advancement of Russian agriculture. The contributions of Russian, German, other European and US agricultural researchers in the nineteenth and twentieth century were considerable, but their diffusion from Russia's centrally located institutes was held back by weak rural markets, restrictions on population movement, and incentive systems with weak rewards for producer investment.

Physical technologies used in Russian farming co-evolved with the social technologies in four different economic regimes: serfdom, communal peasant production, collectivized and state farming, and post-Soviet market-based agriculture. Across these regimes, new technologies led to improvement in yields, but always there was some legacy of the old routines and farming culture, especially in the widespread use of the three-field cultivation regime. The most evident discontinuities are those produced by the introduction of advanced farm equipment, but there can also roughly be traced a diffusion of new biological knowledge from the port cities inward.