What are our guiding principles? Why was the Magház Network created? Read on to learn about our goals.
Magház - Community Network for the Diversity of Agriculture was established in 2012 aiming to work for the conservation of agrobiodiversity in Hungary. Our mission is to connect organizations and individuals working on the conservation and the improvement of crop diversity in the Carpathian Basin. Additionally, we are working towards reaching the following objectives:
- We collect and share best practices about the (self-)sustainable cultivation of plants. What kinds of edible species, varieties or landraces exist? How should we grow, maintain and eat them? We maintain a publicly available platform, so anybody interested can easily acquire the skills and the knowledge required for the first steps on the road towards self-sustainability. Our brochures present the methods of seed saving and growing crops in an easily understandable way.
- We share the collected knowledge through various channels, and we also organize trainings for the interested ones. We find it important that people relearn the methods of cultivating and breeding plants, which have been lost during the process of industrialization. Besides, wisely exploiting new opportunities provided by modern science and technology is also important. The combination of these two can help us in creating truly sustainable systems.
- We create and maintain Community Seed Banks, called Hubs. We reserve propagation materials produced by professionals in order to preserve various species and varieties, but we also share them publicly.
- We create a national network. We connect hubs, seed banks and regional groups in a network so that everybody can join an existing community, and can get the necessary information. Since we are talking about growing crops, regional operation is of high importance, as the conservation of the different landraces requires various environmental conditions.
- We promote ecological gardening (organic farming).
- With our active members (including some organic farmers) we are testing open-pollinated varieties (usually landraces), which have been successfully grown in the other parts of the country. In order to describe the different varieties - and to select the best performing ones for widespread production and marketing -, we observe how they develop under different conditions.
- With this we aim at getting more landraces to the markets, small-scale farmers and CSAs (community supported agriculture initiatives).
- We organize and support seed swaps. We support local and regional seed swaps by providing propagation material and by sharing knowledge and experience. We collect all the seed swaps and the other events connected to the conservation and the improvement agrobiodiversity in one place at our website, publicly sharing the dates and the venues of such events. We prepared a guide for organizing seed swaps, and we also share our own experiences.
- We support the conservation of agrobiodiversity from the side of legislation as well. We support the rights and the interests of farmers.
- We cooperate with organizations at national and international level, in order to strengthen each other while working towards reaching our goals.
If you asked any of our members about how the world should look like, part of their answers would be that in an ideal world consumers were much more actively involved in the production of food than they are today. Instead of an industrial, profit oriented and destructive food industry, “idealists” like us dream of small-scale quality food systems that support all kinds of life.
We believe that traditional and modern knowledge can be (and should be) combined again. But this requires an enormous amount of work, a shift of paradigms and much more opportunities provided. Magház aims to actively participate in this process of change. There are no easy solutions, and we cannot change the world from one day to the next. Our goal is to constantly go on, and to help others during this way to the best of our knowledge.