Until damaged fields are repaired, unused plots should be sown

Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture in Sarajevo, Mirsad Kurtović, warned the BiH news agency Patria that new agricultural locations in BiH need to be urgently activated for sowing.

Although precise data is not yet available, rough estimates suggest that hundreds of hectares of agricultural land in BiH, particularly in Posavina, have been destroyed by landslides and floods in the last fifteen days. Experts warn that the process of repairing these fields will take at least three years and will require enormous financial resources.

- There is nothing organic in the mud that covered the fertile soil, nothing useful, it's garbage. For these fields to be sown again, the land must first be cleaned and prepared for resowing, but that is a long and complex job – said Dr. Kurtović.

- Where there were landslides, we also have a problem. All that infertile soil, the waste material, is now on the surface, and sowing is impossible there. On such terrains, landslides must first be stopped, and then work must be done on preparing and enriching the soil for sowing – he explains.

Kurtović says that it is now necessary to activate unsown locations in BiH with crops that have a faster vegetation period, in order to at least slightly mitigate the catastrophic losses caused by floods and landslides on many agricultural properties by autumn.