Living knowledge of traditional resource management in a Hungarian landscape

Large scale industrial agriculture rapidly wipes out traditional management practice and related knowledge. The mosaic landscape structure of the southern Kiskunság (Hungary) is not suitable for large monocultures, so the small scale, traditional agriculture survived until the seventies, and partially until present. Twenty-one in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted in 2011 and 2012 with local residents and land users about past and present resource management, land use, ecological knowledge, and ecosystem services. Interviewees speaked about a  semi-subsistence economy until the seventies, the adaptive grassland management practice, the fine structured land use adapted to the mosaic soil properties. They argued, that this life is over, and only the use of machines and chemicals can make agriculture profitable, although they were sorry about this fact.