A Hungarian company is developing a system to support sustainable tillage

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Iván Czakó, the company’s leading researcher, explained at the Wednesday event presenting the HUF 545 million R&D project that soil degradation is a significant problem worldwide. About half of the Earth’s soil has degraded in the last 150 years, 60-70 percent of European soils are in a degraded state. The new common agricultural policy encourages sustainable soil cultivation and the promotion of soil regeneration more than before, and the extraordinary increase in the price of input materials encourages producers to do so, said the specialist.

Make the soil healthier

The aim of the project, which will run until the spring of 2025 and will be implemented with HUF 309 million EU support, is to improve soil health, reverse degradation, promote sustainable soil management and soil protection. In order to do this, a decision support system for sustainable tillage is being developed, which is based on modern algorithms using machine learning – the researcher informed. The solution uses a large, nationwide base database, which is created by a wide-ranging examination of the various soil types found in Hungary under different cultivation and microclimatic conditions. The chemical, physical, biological and cultivation characteristics of the soil are recorded in own areas and model farms with on-site measurements and remote sensing methods that also build on the equipment park of precision farming. Large-plot and whole-field experiments have been carried out for several years, and thanks to machine learning, as the database expands, the quality of forecasts is constantly improving, and it is then able to provide producers with more and more complex and reliable expert advice – emphasized Iván Czakó.

The microbiological characteristics of the soil-dwelling colonies are also examined by DNA sequencing

In this way, it is also possible to offer targeted microbiological product consultation, which has been essentially absent from specialist consultation systems – explained the specialist. Based on the new indicators indicating the complex state and health of the soil, they will be able to recommend the correct and sustainable tillage solutions, bacterial fertilization, and the use of cover plant varieties and mixtures, the researcher said.

Karotin Kft. was founded in 1992 and has now become Hungary’s most important lucerne pellet producer, and also produces corn and agripe pellets used for fuel. The company, which employs sixty workers, farms about 3,000 hectares of leased land, about half of which is cultivated with alfalfa and the other part with field crops. According to publicly available company data, the net sales of Karotin Kft., owned by Hungarian individuals, in 2021 – 71 percent of the previous year – was HUF 1.72 billion, of which approximately 8 percent came from exports. The company’s profit after tax in 2020 was HUF 276 million, and its loss in 2021 was HUF 79 million.

MTI