Dr. Harald Schmidt
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Research in practice for practice
I came across Witzenhausen by chance in 1982. After training as a chemical-technical assistant, community service and an unsatisfactory start to my studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK) in Kassel, I was looking for new career prospects. Coming from the village and with a family connection to agriculture, studying agriculture was an option. I could reach Witzenhausen by bike from Kassel and was therefore the first choice for a visit. The charm of Witzenhausen on a sunny day in May, the subject area of alternative farming methods - unique in Germany at the time - and the good student advice convinced me.
The required agricultural internship of one year before starting my studies initially seemed like a high hurdle. I was lucky and joined an organic farming community where I was fully integrated into the work and farming life from day one. The internship had a great influence on my view of agriculture, on the way I classified the course content during my studies and, to this day, on the direction of my research work. Today, I consider an extended internship or agricultural training to be an essential prerequisite for agricultural studies and essential for the practical relevance of the trained agricultural academics.
From student to researcher
The moderate intensity of learning during my studies left room for learning important key skills, e.g. while renovating in a country flat share, during extended coursework or during university political activities such as a university strike. Living in the small town of Witzenhausen with the close social life within the small student body also seemed to me to increase the motivation for intensive and in-depth cooperation during my studies. The combination of practice and study awakened in me early on the desire to scientifically investigate and understand processes in the practice of organic arable farming. A three-year student research project on N-dynamics on field plots was the first step. After my postgraduate studies in ecological environmental protection (comparable to today's Master's degree), I supervised a long-term crop rotation and fertilization trial as part of an EU project for my doctorate - both also in Witzenhausen. This taught me the basics of scientific work and research operations.
From 1997 to 2003, I continued my scientific field trial work with my work at the Chair of Organic Agriculture at the University of Giessen. There I was also intensively involved in teaching and worked on my first self-applied practical project.
Practical research
Since 2004, I have been working as a project scientist on projects that I have acquired myself - mostly at the Stiftung Ökologie & Landbau (SÖL). The disadvantage of only being employed for the duration of the project was and is more than compensated for by the great degree of freedom and the fact that I can carry out projects I have designed myself. Both my own interest and the lack of research equipment at the SÖL prompted me to develop research approaches based on investigations on practically cultivated fields. Topics included the analysis of arable farming problems, the description and testing of examples of livestock-free or ploughless organic farming and mechanical weed control in herb cultivation (at Ökoplant e.V.). Since 2009, the focus of my projects has been primarily on the cultivation of legumes.
After 15 years of research in the field, I consider this scientific approach to be an important addition to traditional field trial research. Although the results are often less precise, the approach also offers a number of advantages, e.g.: the development of results under practical conditions; the possibility of investigating issues that are difficult, time-consuming or tedious to investigate with field trials; the classification of research results in terms of their significance for practice and the detailed mapping of the range of practical agriculture.
Looking back, the intensive period of study in Witzenhausen contributed significantly to my interest in organic farming, the research direction I took and my perspective on agriculture.