Production of neutrons in the vicinity of the pion pole

High-energy hadronic reactions with proton-to-neutron transitions (and vice versa) with small momentum transfer allow to study the properties of nearly on-shell pions, which cannot be accessed otherwise. We overview the recent results for such processes in deeply inelastic scattering, single and double leading neutron production in pp collisions, including polarization effect. A special attention is paid to the absorption effects, which are found to be much stronger than what has been evaluated previously.