Sustainable soil management in the Badacsony Wine District

Barnabas Kovacs

doi:10.19040/ecocycles.v4.i2.115

Abstract

Agricultural landscapes with historical hillside vineyard cultivation have a touristic, economic, and environmental value in the Balaton uplands. However, sustainable cultivation methods are becoming increasingly important within today's adaptation to climate change impacts on these lands much exposed to erosion. Our long-term field experiment compared the effects of several soil-cover methods in several aspects. We recorded and examined the consequent changes in the physical (soil moisture), chemical (absorbable nitrogen content), biological (enzyme activity: fluorescein diacetate hydrolysis and dehydrogenase), the most probable number of bacteria and fungi), and economic (yield) parameters of soils. According to our results in 2017, mulching with organic plant wastes achieved the most positive effect on the parameters studied and also efficiently reduced erosion in the plantation.

Highlights

Agricultural practices are continuous shapers of the environment and considerations such as agri-tourism, sustainable farming, and landscape management are only taken into account after the economic aspects
Tourism brings the most revenue for the local population and it is the most important source of income for businesses - as opposed to the previously dominant agriculture
More than a decade ago, researchers at the Viticulture and Oenology Research Station in Badacsony recognized this significant hiatus across Europe (Panagos et al 2015, Rodrigo-Comino 2018) and established a long-term study on soil covering processes in a vineyard that was deliberately exposed to erosion

Summary

Introduction

Agricultural practices are continuous shapers of the environment and considerations such as agri-tourism, sustainable farming, and landscape management are only taken into account after the economic aspects. Keywords – vineyard, cover crop, agricultural landscape management, soil biology, sustainability The vine growing culture of the Badacsony wine region involves farming on the slopes of volcanic hills which, in the course of soil cultivation, got gradually exposed to erosion, especially in the hill-valley orientation (Zanathy 1998, Varga and Májer 2004, Kirchoff et al 2017).

Results

Conclusion