Precision farming may play an important role in agricultural innovation. The study focuses on the attitude of Hungarian farmers toward precision farming. Based on the relevant technical literature, we performed a nationally representative questionnaire survey of 594 farmers and deep interviews with experts and farmers (30 persons). As regards the questionnaire, the authors found that the management of the average farm size in Hungary has the highest willingness to innovate and the second highest level of education among the developed clusters. The survey shows undertrained farmers with large farms to be the second most open group, which may result in the partial application of precision farming techniques. One of the most unexpected results of the Precision Farmers’ cluster is that the positive socio-economic utility of precision farming is rated as extremely low. In-depth interviews prove that the use of precision technologies does not increase local social cohesion. Strong organisational isolation of precision farmers prevents the spread of innovation knowledge and precision farming amongst the farming community, and the challenges of competitiveness alone do not force farmers to apply precision farming. Our results may be useful for the establishment of agricultural strategy.

The basic question of our research is what crop-producing farmers know about PF (precision farming), and how economic value and social factors motivate the acceptance and implementation of PF. We conducted a cross-sectional survey, using standardized questionnaires, in 2018, that was nationally representative of Hungarian crop producers. Besides this, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews about the meaning of PF, with the farmers who use PF in practice. They defined it as a tool of strategic planning, to serve input savings, using state-of-the-art technologies. Based on the questionnaire, we found that the farmers currently applying PF do not seem to have such a significant impact on the agricultural society that would make others want to move to precision technology, following their example. As a result of the factor analysis, we could differentiate direct and indirect factors. Potential human resources are undereducated, their willingness to improve their knowledge is low, and the level of cooperation ability is low, making it excessively difficult, or even impossible, to acquire the equipment necessary for a technology switch and to purchase the necessary services. It can be concluded that age, production, and technical usefulness carries greater weight over things like monetary factors, productivity of cultivated land, knowledge capital, and willingness of Hungarian farmers to cooperate.

This article discusses the use of drones in Hungary and considers their future penetration, based on the responses to a nationally representative 2021 questionnaire among 200 large-scale farmers engaged in precision farming and in crop production. Both the applied trans-theoretical model (with ordinal logit regression model) and the questionnaire design are suitable for comparison with the results of a similar survey in Germany. In this study, similar results were found for farm size, age, main job and education, but the evidence that higher education in agriculture has the largest positive effect on the use of drones is a novelty. The frequency values obtained for adopting precision technology elements are not fully suitable for classification due to interpretational shortcomings. The use of drones within precision technologies is no longer negligible (17%), but is nevertheless expected to grow significantly due to continuous innovation and the selective application of inputs. The state could play a major role in future uptake, particularly in the areas of training and harmonisation of legislation.

This chapter examines the relationship between knowledge and Environmental Citizenship. Knowledge has been attributed to have an essential role in influencing pro-environmental behaviour and as such in the development of Environmental Citizenship. We argue that the ‘right’ kind of environmental knowledge is a necessary precondition for pro-environmental behaviour and thus for Environmental Citizenship. In this chapter, we focus on knowledge, but we also emphasise that efforts on fostering knowledge alone in education for Environmental Citizenship, without links to real life, competencies and values, are insufficient for the sake of a sustainable world. We explore which knowledge is needed in order to cultivate the coherent and adequate skills, values, attitudes and competences that we think an Environmental Citizen should have. We identify three different types of knowledge: (i) environmental systems knowledge, (ii) action-related knowledge and (iii) effectiveness knowledge. Finally, we suggest a process of co-production of new knowledge between experts and key citizens as central to the idea of a participatory approach towards developing Environmental Citizenship.

This paper aims to show the main processes of rural restructuring of Hungary after the change of political system and EU integration. It describes the changes of agricultural land-use, new dynamics of urban rural relations and rural development of the last 25 years. In the paper, we argue that the most dynamic changes happened in the era of post-communism, ended by EU-accession and the era of consolidation. A characteristic phenomenon of these changes was the urban demand for providing facilities related to rural landscape and culture. Therefore, permanent and temporary migrations into rural areas have become the most important element of development for rural places in the last decades. The introduction of a new Europeanised rural development system has shaped these processes and reconfigured local power relations, economic and social networks. These turbulent changes occurred at the same time with the collapse of the socialist-type co-operative and state farm system, along with the restitution and reprivatisation of land, resulting in the concentration of land use and agricultural production. The paper aims at analysing these processes by discussing the dynamics of urban-rural relationships and the new rural development system, while the final part focuses on land-use changes and its impacts on rural society.