Agricultural Regions of Croatia

Abstract

We take the agricultural region, or rather subregion, as the main spatial unit for describing Croatian soils. As a territorially small country, Croatia is “a small-sized Europe”—the point of contact of three main European climate types: continental, mountainous, and Mediterranean. Geological and metrological properties and natural plant cover are also very heterogeneous. Thanks to all these influences and heterogeneity of relief, Croatia has a range of different soil types, with different properties, which ultimately means very wide possibilities for plant growing. After having become an autonomous state, one of the new requirements of Croatia, important to the agronomic profession, farmers, policy-makers, and public needs, was the regionalization of agriculture. This is an analysis of the state of agroecological conditions in the agrosphere and is based on the results of attempts to define and territorially separate agricultural regions into parts of the agrosphere with similar conditions for plant and animal growth and similar farming systems. In this regard, within a special project, we completed an inventory of the agrosphere, the results of which were presented in the monograph Regionalization of Croatian Agriculture. To enable a science-based, useful and contemporary regionalization, our starting approach was the MFCAL concept. This means that apart from the obviously very important and primary productive function (food security), agriculture and agricultural soil in human life play other roles of the same importance: environmental, social, cultural, and spatial, as well as the role of shaping the cultural landscape in rural development. In some areas, such as national parks and other protected and/or environmentally- areas like water-protection areas, catchment areas of unpolluted rivers and lakes, and water bodies under protection (the total area of such land in Croatia is 590,000 ha), the most important functions of soil are the environmental and regulatory functions. In other areas it is the social function—profitable employment and maintenance of demographic balance—and, finally, in some areas it is the shaping of a cultural landscape with an important role in rural life, recreation, and tourism. For regionalization we used practically all natural and human-influenced factors of spatial differentiation of agroecological conditions: firstly land resource potential , then soil types and properties of soil, land use and farming systems as its consequence, climatic conditions, natural vegetation, and geomorphological, lithological, and hydrological properties. For the analysis and for making a distinction between agricultural regions and subregions, we used the data of the General Soil Map of Croatia (GSM) at a scale of 1:50,000 as a basic document. Using those data and the results of our research, we defined three agricultural regions: a Pannonian region with four subregions, a Mountain region with two subregions, and an Adriatic region with three subregions.