Farmers are suffering, but the government is not urgent to replace the water on the sand ridge that is turning into a desert

“Corn should be sown, but the ground is very dry. Well, we’re just trying,” farmer István told Telex, explaining how they are trying to get through the months-long drought on his land next to a village on the sand ridge. It did rain a little in mid-April, but it should have been much more. The farmer took out a spade and pressed it into the sand, and when he turned the tool over, it looked good: the top of the sand was a little wet about three fingers thick, but completely dry underneath. This little water will also go up from here, it won’t go down deeper, because it evaporates – the farmer thought.

István’s family farms ten hectares on the sand, they have arable fields and small orchards, separated from each other, in several pieces. The village is located in the sand ridge between the Danube and the Tisza, where farming is increasingly difficult. To the south and east of Szeged, there are better-quality black soils, which are less threatened by drying out, but in the areas north and west of the city, sand dominates the Southern Great Plain.

Twenty years ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization classified the sand ridge in the semi-desert zone.

For three decades, experts have been saying that the area is gradually becoming a desert, and something must be done about it. So far, however, there have not been many tangible results, and the solution to partial water replacement is being pushed back again.

Since the 1970s, the groundwater level has decreased by two to five meters, but there are places where the wet zone has sunk by ten meters. As the ground water goes down, farmers drill deeper and deeper wells for irrigation, but not everyone can afford the costs of this. In smaller farms, you really have to think about how much money is worth investing in production, because it is not certain that the harvest will have a benefit beyond the investment. How much the farm brings or takes away in a year is only revealed at the very end, when all the work has been done and the crops have been sold.

István’s farmers grow corn, cereals, alfalfa, peaches, as well as cantaloupe and strawberries in two smaller areas. The last two years were also severely droughty, so very little of everything was produced. They had other lands nearby, a family inheritance, but they sold them, and from that income they make up for the losses of crop cultivation in recent years. In the meantime, prices not only rose in grocery stores, but also fertilizers, fuel, and everything else needed for growing plants became much more expensive. There are things that cost twice as much now as they did a few years ago.

Farmer István did not want to appear with his full name or in a photo, but he took me around the vineyard roads around his village in his own car. He showed that the crops were turning yellow, even though the grain should be dark green, richer and much larger than it is now. The nearly thirty-year-old van rolled slowly on the sand. The farmer is not young either, he is over seventy. Both he and his wife are retired, before that István worked as an electrician and also farmed. Now, together with their adult children, they continue the family farm to supplement their pension.

Rabbits are also very thirsty

In recent years, the yield of all plants is getting smaller and smaller, the income is decreasing, and this has not been improved in any way. Two years ago, they started growing pumpkins on half a hectare with intensive irrigation. But the thirsty hares and deer came to drink, and the thin plastic pipes were chewed by the wild animals to get more water. When almost a hundred new repair parts had to be installed in one week to replace the chewed pipes, the Istváns saw that this did not make sense.
Lucerne should also be sown now, but it is not clear whether it is worth it, he explained. A few years ago, it was customary to sow this fodder plant in early spring, because the April rains germinated the seeds, but in the recent, increasingly dry weather, it is a big question whether the plant will germinate at all.

Growing vegetables in itself is very water-intensive, and the weather can destroy the fruit, the peaches, which are typically grown on sand ridges. Changeable weather also takes its toll on plants, and a mild winter favors pests and pathogens. The heat came early this year, followed by a strong cooling, and some of the peach blossoms froze. If another strong cold front comes during the frosts, it can take away the crop in the middle of May, as it did several times in previous years. The Istváns are now hoping that the strawberries might do well this year and bring some benefit.

There does not appear to be a good solution for their work to be sustainably profitable instead of additional payment. In addition, smaller farms like theirs cannot participate in state tenders either. The subsidy amount of one or two million, which would be available for the size of their farm, would not be worth it to a competent grant writer, because he would barely make any money on it.

In the fields around the village, you can see many fields left fallow. According to István, more and more people are abandoning agriculture, but they continue because they would not be able to live on their low pension. “We don’t have much of a choice: we’ll do it while we can,” he said.

Extreme heat and drought are more frequent

According to the statement issued by the Chamber of Agriculture in mid-April, there is no general drought, but “the soil has been critically dry in the Great Plain since mid-March, so there is a drought in a large area from the point of view of spring sowing”.

“According to the data, from February to the end of April this year, the lands around Szeged lack two months’ worth of rainfall,” climate researcher Tamás Gál, head of the Department of Climatology at the University of Szeged, told Telex, adding that extreme weather phenomena are becoming more frequent and intensifying as climate change progresses. forward.

According to Gál, the situation is even worse for agricultural producers this spring, because the drought was combined with the high heat that arrived early. In this period, since the beginning of the measurements, it has not been this warm in the Southern Great Plain. And this also speeds up the drying of the soil, so the lack of water is even more severe in the fields. The slightly more frequent rains in the last week of April did little to improve the situation, and there was more rain in the northern part of the country, with the least amount falling in the Southern Great Plain. In addition, the warming will increase again from the end of April, because of this further drying of the soil will again be unfavorable for crops, he added.

Previous governments did not have an urgent need for water replacement

Experts have been talking for three decades, and the press has often written about it, that the sand ridge between the Danube and Tisza is turning into a desert, and something should be done about it. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has also recommended faster action twenty years ago.

“A series of smaller and larger conferences are organized here and there in the affected sand ridge area about the problem. Actually, about what didn’t happen and what should have been done. Then our politicians and one or two esteemed – inter-departmental – ministry specialists come and “talk” about the topic at a two- to three-hour event. For more than a decade, the programs of the sand ridge have generally been declared settled by these conferences,” wrote researcher Bálint Csatári in 2004.

Since then, there have been ambitious plans to dig a new channel between the two rivers, and plans were made to divert the water of the Danube and Tisza to the sand ridge or at least some parts of it. The Danube/Tisza could be closed off with loud promises, for example in 2013 it was announced that they would “eliminate the desert”.

However, little is heard about what was really solved during the almost decade and a half of the Orbán governments. At best, the ideas developed for a larger proportion of water replacement are still in the preparation stage. Béla Mihálffy, the Fidesz-KDNP member of parliament for the villages around Szeged on the sand ridge, said in 2022: “A government decision has been made that HUF 1.826 billion will be provided from the state budget so that the water from the Tisza can reach Mórahalom from the canal built up to Zákányszék.”

According to this, the water of the Tisza was transported from Algyő, to a height of more than 15 meters, to Zákányszék, to Lake Lódri. But this area, similar to the other smaller, saline lakes in the region, was originally a swampy area, periodically and partially covered with water, so this cannot mean a big change in the water supply of the sandy area so far.

The promised investment is postponed

It seems that nothing else has happened in the last two years. According to information from Szeged.hu, it was recently revealed at a professional briefing in Szeged that the government ranked the water replacement investment at the back. Because of this, even the Fidesz-dominated county government is dissatisfied, the members of the assembly, regardless of party affiliation, agreed to prepare a proposal for the May assembly, in which “they draft a letter to the government stating that the situation on the sand ridge, especially in the settlements of Csongrád-Csanád County, is very serious due to lack of water”.

We asked the Lower Tisza Water Administration (Ativizig), which supervises the implementation of the water plans, what, according to their knowledge, the postponement of the water replacement state investment on the sand ridge means exactly. The employee of Ativizig later told us by phone that he had forwarded the questions to the National Directorate General of Water, which is responsible for the matter. If they respond, we’ll let you know.

What has already been completed from the canals and reservoirs does not bring water to the area either – answered our question, landscape architect Kármán Kolos from Zzombo. For years, he has been trying to find out what is the situation with the water management of the sand ridge, and he does not see that anything has been resolved.

Meanwhile, the drainage of internal water and groundwater is clearly working: the water collected in channels dug in the sand is led from the sand ridge to the Tisza, while it should be kept on the fields. In the past, EU grants were used to build the canals, and they even asked for money from the Norwegian Fund. Now, however, it would cost billions more to divert the water in the Tisza back from the river to at least a small part of the sand ridge. Until now, not much has been perceptible from the water replenishment of the sand ridge for those who are trying to farm their land in an area that is increasingly turning into a desert, which is one-tenth of Hungary.