At the institute, I am also responsible for long-term grassland trials, the oldest of which are already 55 years old. There are grasslands that were sown in 1968, and nothing has been done to them other than fertilising and mowing, with yield recorded; nothing extra has been sown, and they have not been ploughed. For comparison, there are others that are continuously ploughed, renewed, and so on. When those trials began, the issue of carbon did not even cross anyone’s mind until the 1990s. The question then was more about which type of management in grassland farming might be the most effective: whether it is just mowing, combining it with grazing, how to fertilise, whether manure is needed or not, and so on. Then the question of carbon arose, and the most interesting thing is that many people believe that no-till technologies will give us an enormous contribution. But we are not finding a significant – statistically proven – difference. That where we have not ploughed for 55 years, more total carbon would have accumulated than in those plots which we occasionally, every third or sixth year, plough. This simply means that the process is extremely long-term; it does not happen from one year to the next.
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