Review of soil tillage history and new challenges in Hungary

Abstract

This study provides an overview of the development of soil tillage in Hungary. The primary goal is to present factors that have been promoting and hindering progress in tillage from the first authoritative records – from the eleventh century – up to now when soil tillage became a tool in the climate damage mitigation methods. Progress was restricted during the first eight hundred years of the history of tillage by lack of expertise and the use of primitive tools. In retrospect, much of the traditions are regarded as obstacles to progress while the adoption of certain foreign trends fostered development in most cases. The history of the development of tillage in Hungary is divided into seven eras, with equal positive and negative impacts on the quality of the soils. The quality of soils was threatened before 1900 primarily by the multi-ploughing systems, while reasonable tillage offered a chance for improvement. The geographical location of Hungary in Europe and the Hungarian language entailed a certain degree of isolation as well. It may have been the reason why Hungarian reasonable tillage could not become a forerunner of minimum tillage. New soil tillage methods developed abroad had influenced primarily education and experiments carried out in Hungary. After the regime change, however, such methods came to be driving progress in practice as well, thanks to a widened horizon. In 1998 soil conservation tillage were used on about 25 per cent of the total sown land, however, a decade and a half later the area cultivated by conservation methods had doubled. A survey conducted five years ago found that significant progress had been made in soil conservation tillage in dry seasons but the achievements are often eroded by return to the conventional modes during wet seasons.