János Áder: modern agriculture also offers attractive opportunities for young people

In the program, which is available on the world wide web, as well as on the most popular video sharing site, János Áder – the chairman of the board of trustees of the Kék Bolygó Climate Protection Foundation – talks with János Lázár about how the Mezőhegyes school farm, whose shares are owned by the Jövő Nemzedék Földje Foundation, has managed to reach in the last five years owns it. It was said that during the monarchy, the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture discovered the treasure that the farmland here represents. This is the country’s best-quality farmland, which is 10,000 hectares in one piece, with an extremely high average land quality: 45 golden crowns, while the Hungarian average is 21 golden crowns. They recalled that in the second half of the 19th century, an explosive development took place in Hungary, during which the Hungarian side became the flagship of the food industry in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Intensive agricultural activity began, with a sugar factory, the production and processing of food raw materials – recalled János Lázár. The two world wars and collectivization did a lot of harm, János Áder suggested. The military leadership of the estate was replaced, and then the process lasted until the 90s, when someone could be the head of the estate not based on expertise, but on the basis of political reliability. The year 2016 was mentioned as an important date in the history of the estate, when, after the previous unsuccessful privatization, the Hungarian state decided not to auction off this estate, but to keep it and try to prove that state-owned property can also be operated profitably for the benefit of the public. while also having a social function. János Lázár stressed that the most important social function is to serve as a model for the quality and efficiency of farming here for all Hungarian farmers.

In the conversation, it was also pointed out that inefficiencies in production were also revealed

This was the case with irrigation farming, during which twice as much water was used at half the efficiency of American agriculture. János Lázár emphasized: it has been proven that one must always adapt to the changed environmental conditions. Precipitation conditions, which can now be monitored digitally, are just as important. These modern observations revealed that there are various changes in the last 20 years. In the last five years, this has also meant a decrease in quantity, but even before that, irregularities and differences in intensity were experienced. There is much debate about the method of irrigation. The simple process of extracting fresh water from rivers, transporting it to the right places and injecting it into the soil from above is criticized. This method uses too much water, is not economical and places a disproportionately large burden on the environment. Therefore, it was necessary to find the most efficient irrigation technology. This is now used on the estate, as a result of which they have achieved that they can irrigate an area twice as large as before with 60 percent of the previous water volume. Western technologies are very advanced in this field, but there is always Hungarian added value in it, with which Hungarian specialists can tune it to our own conditions – it was said. If our goal is to make food production a priority, tradition is not enough for that, but adaptation and modernization are also necessary – stated János Lázár, to which János Áder added, there is a threefold over-enrollment in the vocational secondary school in Mezőhegyes, which proves that the young people find this modernized agriculture attractive and see a future in it.

MTI