Many landlords divided their estates among family members or registered them as mechanized lands. Because of these loopholes, the first phase was not entirely effective. Out of about 50,000 Iranian villages only 13, 904 villages were affected by the first phase and only 5,000 entire villages were sold to the peasants, meaning that only about 20 percent of the rural population were affected during this period. .
The second phase, during 1964-1968, affected most of the lands not altered during the first phase. It was more conservative and meant mainly to prevent the peasantry from emerging as a strong political entity. Lands were mainly rented to the peasants and the crop-sharing system was reinstituted. It affected about 40,00 villages. The third and fourth phases, during 1968-1971, the land was not distributed among the peasants. These stages aimed to create a large-scale farming and agribusiness. To do so, the boundaries of the Iranian villages were broken down and the small and scattered lands were consolidated into large holdings. The high cost of operating forced the small landowners to sell their lands to the landlords and become agricultural workers on what was previously their own land. Often the peasants were forcibly evicted to allow the agribusinesses to operate. .
The land reform phases failed. Despite the advances that the first and second phases made in giving peasants their own land, the second and third phases took away that land, causing many of the newly landless peasants to migrate to the cities for jobs, abandoning their agricultural work. The population of the villages decreased, and agriculture declined. The Shah often had grand visions of modernization that he could not successfully realize.
On January 23, 1973 the Shah announced he was starting a "White Revolution." The Revolution consisted of six criteria: land reform, sale of state-owned factories to finance land reform, voting rights for women, profit-sharing for industrial workers, the creation of a literary corps, and nationalization of forests.
