Joint International Conference on Long-term Experiments ...

THE IMPORTANCE OF LONG-TERM FIELD EXPERIMENTS IN THE
QUALITY ASSURANCE OF CROP PRODUCTION
ABSTRACT
Éva Széles, Zsuzsanna Szathmáry, Péter Sipos, Dóra Hovánszki,
Csilla Uri, Zoltán Győri
University of Debrecen, Centre for Agricultural Sciences
Institute of Food Science, Quality Assurance and Microbiology
The quality assurance and traceability of food products has become a major issue of
food safety during the previous years. Long-term filed experiments can give well
applicable data for food safety and food processing.
The objectives of long-term field trials are to measure the effectiveness of different
fertilizers and types of farmyard manure in different cropping environments, and to
determine the accumulation of various elements in the soil or the plant. This is the only
way to obtain statistically reliable data about the interaction between the effect of
fertilizers and other management techniques (soil cultivation, crop density, etc.), as well
as to set the limit values for the chemical soil examination.
In this work, applicability and necessity of long-term field experiments to the food
safety through a National Long-Term Field Trials was studied.
Keywords: National Long-Term Field Trials, element correlations
INTRODUCTION
As food production is getting more and more global, the multiple sources, suppliers and
process steps along production pose a threat to the safety of the product. Therefore, the
quality assurance and traceability of food products has become a major issue of food
safety during the previous years. Participants in the food chain are expected to know the
origin of the raw materials they use in order to comply with new regulations and with
consumer expectations. Regulation EC/178/2002, known commonly as the food law of
the EU has taken up a new integrated approach, stating that the regulations for food and
feed cannot be handled separately. The “farm to fork” or “stable to table” principle
covers all sectors of the food chain, including feed production, primary production, food
processing, storage, transportation and retail sale. Hungary, as an export-oriented and
EU member country also has to meet the new EU requirements in order to be able to
produce goods that meet the requirements of other countries.
Since the requirements in the crop production sector are less strict than in animal
production and the issue of the quality assurance of feed grain crops and forages is even
more neglected, efforts are continuous in the EU to involve primary production in the
scope of food regulation. Primary production (the agricultural sector) has a critical role
in ensuring safe raw materials, since deteriorations in the raw materials cannot be
eliminated later during the processing stage. Therefore, the quality assurance of food
products should start with the certification of safe seed and cultivation techniques.
This requirement can be met by using management techniques during which the
level of the possible contaminating factors in the soil and their intake by the crop is
measured and controlled. Long-term field trials are a system of researches conducted at
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