This article examines characteristics of the economic history of the Slovenian countryside in socialist Slovenia through the perspective of the changes that the purchase of modern agrarian technological devices brought to the peasant households. It is based on the concept of an integrated peasant economy, which explains that peasant households made a living by combining self-sufficient agriculture and market-oriented activities and takes a closer look at peasant families of part-time farmers (semi-proletarians). The article highlights the importance of agricultural modernisation, which significantly determined the development of agriculture through the modernisation of production techniques and the introduction of agricultural machinery. It provides insights into who in the family introduced innovations to the farm and how the process of farm mechanisation affected social stratification and generational discontinuities within an individual peasant economic unit. Using an oral history approach the article does not strive to reconstruct the socialist past and write it cronologically, but seeks to present a different perspective based on the experiences of part-time farmers and their daily practices thus contributing additional discourse to the already existing political and economic official historical discourse.