Abstract
Agriculture has always played a determining role in Hungarian landscapes. Forested areas were also under agricultural use; however, their use changed, starting at least from the Middle Ages when the need for new arable fields resulted in a tremendous decrease in forested areas. The protection of forests started for many reasons, saving them for fuelwood and construction materials. This is the reason why there were periods when forests of the Carpathian Basin suffered from considerable pressure, and even today, this pressure continues; however, the source changed from animal husbandry to tourism, forestry, and wildlife management, or rather hunting. This created the need to search for and analyse former sustainable use of the forests. Furthermore, the consideration of the use of trees/treelines is under the scope of helping the climate adaptation of arable fields. Wooded grasslands have also been mapped and various analyses were done, related to their survival. We wish to introduce some of the ancestral forms of the agricultural use of Hungarian farming, where trees play an important role, their origin, distribution, threatening factors, and their future. Sustainable arable farming systems with trees, including wood-pastures; orchard grasslands and conventional, organic, and permaculture horticultural farms with various proportion of tree cover, will be described.
Highlights
The population of the Earth is growing, and feeding this population faces numerous challenges [1,2,3]
The answer for increasing food production is normally an intensive farming activity that induces several problems from environmental protection, through human health to nature conservation [4]
The literature review and map analyses proved that wood-pastures had an important role in Hungarian agricultural production
Summary
The population of the Earth is growing, and feeding this population faces numerous challenges [1,2,3]. The protection of the natural environment, the natural values, the habitats, and the species is facing challenges at a similar or even larger scale [2]. There are various emerging patterns to solve the problem of producing more agricultural products with less stress on the environment and more benefit for human health and biodiversity [5]. Some of these practices have roots in the past, in ancient agricultural practices, no matter if they were intentional or accidental. Some of these examples can be found in the form of wooded grasslands and wood-pastures, orchard grasslands, or permaculture with considerable tree cover (partly forested areas)
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