One of the most important tasks of the National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre Institute of Agricultural Engineering (NARIC MGI) is to annually provide information on the evolution of agricultural machine operation costs in Hungary. Therefore, the Institute – in addition to other activities – monitors and updates changes concerning agricultural machinery through the use of operational data and values of basic farms on a yearly basis. The work results in the development and publication of a booklet which best summarizes the actual cost of agricultural work performed by different machines. It contains the average performance and cost of agricultural machines and equipment calculated by expected prices, wages, and other costs. In this article, our aim is to present the main results of the observation and summarize the main conclusions of traditional and organic farms in Hungary.
Threat to the natural environment posed by technical objects, including agricultural machines, taken out of use is becoming an important problem in modern societies. Their management should be arranged through recycling. The recyclability of machines varies and at the stage of production ought to be determined and evaluated using appropriate methods. The methods used at present are either very complicated and difficult to use or over simplistic, so it is impossible to obtain objective evaluations. This study presents an original method to assess the recyclability of agricultural machinery, which takes into consideration the material composition and structure of machines, and partly eliminates the drawbacks of the methods used so far.