The best generator operators of the hail damage mitigation system were awarded

(Photo: NAK)

As every year since 2018, the national ice damage mitigation system operated by the National Chamber of Agriculture (NAK) protected agricultural, residential and public assets from hail damage in 2024.

The cornerstones of the system’s operation are the generator operators, among whom the best performers received awards

The ice damage mitigation system operated by the chamber delivers silver iodide into the clouds from 986 points in the country – with the help of 219 automatic and 767 manual soil generators. This year was the seventh year of operation of the system built by the NAK, and the Government provides a maximum of 2 billion forints of separate funds for its operation. According to calculations, every 1 forint spent on the system saves about 33 forints of production value, which means 50 billion forints of saved production value on an annual basis. In addition, the system also protects residential, industrial, public values, real estate and movable property.

Temperature records were broken one after another in 2024, and the weather was extremely stormy

Despite this, there was much less hail damage in our country than in other countries in our region. This is fundamentally due to the fact that the national hail damage mitigation system provided protection against and mitigated hail damage this year as well. In the 169-day protection season, ice-hazardous clouds formed over our country on a total of 93 days, of which thunderstorms were extremely ice-hazardous on 32 days. The extraordinary nature of the weather in 2024 is clearly demonstrated by the fact that this number is almost double that of the year before last.

The system’s generators had to be turned on for a total of nearly 188 thousand operating hours in 2024

In 2024 – during the protection season from April 15 to September 30 – farmers reported hail damage on a total of 47,192 hectares, covering a total of 68 days. However, even with the extreme weather, this is a significantly smaller area than in 2017, the last year when the national system was not yet operational. At that time, damage reports were received for an area about one and a half times as large, 72 thousand hectares.

NAK