Zoltán Black

* Zsarnóca, March 31, 1911 – † Budapest, November 9, 1988 / agricultural meteorologist, soil scientist, university professor ; ; He started elementary school in Selmecbánya, where his father, Zoltán Fekete (Selmecbánya), was a teacher at the Mining and Forestry Engineering College. After the college was moved to Sopron in 1919, he completed his secondary school studies at the local Evangelical Lyceum. Before graduating, he studied in London for a year, where he went to learn English. He had a good sense of language, spoke German well, and learned some Flemish while visiting the Netherlands as a child, and also understood Bulgarian, Russian and Slovak, and read Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He graduated in 1929, and the following year he began his studies at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, majoring in natural history and chemistry, and in January 1935 he obtained a teaching certificate in natural history and chemistry, and in June 1935 he obtained a doctoral degree with a thesis on geology. ; From 1935 to 1937 he worked as a teacher at the Orosháza Gymnasium, during which time he wrote his first thesis on soil science, which was published in the Yearbook of the Orosháza Guild of Fine Arts. In 1937, he became an assistant professor to Professor Béla Mauritz (Kassa) at the Budapest University of Science and Technology, and from there he moved to the soil science laboratory of the Keszthely College of Economics in August 1941, which was reorganized into a department the following year, and he worked there as a professor of soil science until 1949, when he was appointed to the Faculty of Horticulture of the Budapest University of Agricultural Sciences as a professor of soil science. Meteorology played an important role in his teaching activities, as he was convinced that weather and climate play a significant role in the formation of soils, in maintaining their fertility and, last but not least, in their degradation. He was also interested in the issues of improving sandy soils, and he studied the effects of subsoil fertilization mainly in the case of various horticultural crops (vegetables, fruit). He conducted many experiments to reduce erosion damage, and in this area he achieved good results, especially in orchards. He also actively participated in the development of fertilization guidelines for vegetable gardens, orchards, and vineyards. He published his publications with co-authors. From 1952, he was the president of the Hungarian Meteorological Society for three years. In 1970, he received the MTESZ Award and in 1977, the Steiner Lajos Memorial Medal.