Hungary's 'water guardian' farmers fight back against desertification
28.12.2025
Oszkár Nagyapáti climbed to the bottom of a sandy pit on his land on the Great Hungarian Plain and dug into the soil with his hand, looking for a sign of groundwater that in recent years has been in accelerating retreat. Nagyapáti has watched with distress as the region in southern Hungary, once an important site for agriculture, has become increasingly parched and dry. In a 2017 paper in European Countryside, a scientific journal, researchers cited “the combined effect of climatic changes, im