The day before we went out to the fields, Ferenc Berend’s farm finally received some long-awaited rain – about 24 mm. Before that, there had been practically no rain for a month. Even after the rainfall, however, the soil remained very hard.
Our first stop was a field where cattle had been grazing just a week earlier. Because of the severe drought, Ferenc did not divide the area into small paddocks this year. The herd grazed roughly 5 hectares and moved through the whole area in about 12–14 days.
Ferenc described the soil condition very simply:
— The ground was like concrete, very hard.
Two other Hungarian farmers joined us in the field. One of them was Daniel Racsmany, who had come to Kyiv for ReAgro25 together with Ferenc.
Daniel had a simple metal soil probe with a red handle. He used it to check how easily it could penetrate the soil.
On the grazed area, the probe went in with difficulty.
At first glance, the conclusion seemed obvious: the cattle had compacted the soil.
But there was another obvious factor – the prolonged drought. There had been almost no rain through most of the summer, and about 20 mm of rain the day before could not significantly soften such dry soil overnight.
So Daniel suggested a comparison.
We moved to the edge of the field, closer to the tree line, to an area where the soil is not cultivated and remains in a natural state. There, the probe went in to roughly the same depth – about 20 cm.
That is where the test became much more interesting.
This kind of check can be useful not only after livestock grazing. During drought, any soil can become very hard — both on pasture and in a field where crops are grown.
So the depth to which a probe penetrates the soil does not tell us very much on its own.
What matters more is having a nearby reference point — an area where the soil is not cultivated and remains in a natural state.
In our case, the probe penetrated to roughly the same depth both in the grazed field and in the reference area.
So hard soil after grazing does not automatically prove that livestock caused the compaction — especially when the test is carried out after a prolonged drought.