Agriculture must respond to climate change with an immediate and complete structural change

In 2025, every month was drier than average, except for March. June, which is traditionally one of our wettest months, has become the driest and second warmest this year according to measurements conducted since 1901. Severe drought has again devastated the Danube-Tisza region, east of Lake Balaton and in Békés. According to researchers, drought is a natural part of Hungary’s climate, but the changes in its frequency and severity are related to climate change. Agriculture must respond to climate change, which fundamentally determines our everyday lives, but even more so our future, with an immediate and complete structural change; for example, plowing should be abandoned in more and more cases in soil and land use – said Dr. Csaba Gyuricza, agricultural engineer, soil engineer, rector of MATE.

Another major issue of climate change is the amount of water used in the fields

It is not the amount of precipitation that is radically decreasing, but the increasing temperature and the evaporation caused by it that are making less and less usable in the soil. The distribution of annual precipitation has also changed: due to weather extremes, the proportion of intensive precipitation is much higher, so a large amount of precipitation falls in a short time, which is not stored either in the soil or in modern sewer networks or reservoirs created for this purpose. According to the rector of MATE, we should adapt our land use system to these changed weather conditions if we want to think about 21st century Hungarian agriculture in the future. Climate change and its effects on agriculture are also among the topics of the Carpathian Basin Large Student Agricultural Test 5 – Farm Smartly! online competition. The three-round, online, educational contest, which has been extended beyond the border, can be joined by high school students, but anyone can complete the game. The first round of the competition is available until December 7, 2025 on www.agrarteszt.hu. The 1,000 players who achieved the best results here will be invited to the semi-finals to be held on December 12, 2025, from where the fate of the valuable prizes will be decided among the 10 most successful student agricultural scientists who will reach the final on December 17. The award ceremony will take place at the Educatio International Education Fair in January 2026, where the winner will be a two-person trip to Greece, a bicycle and a mobile phone.

MATE