Nuffield #17 It’s Usually Better in Sweden

My final full day in the Nordic countries; and my last Nuffield visit of this trip. From the ferry I caught a train in Helsinki heading north, and four hours later arrived in the city of Kuopio, a fairly small place sitting beside a lake (like most towns in Finland). Just outside the city lies one of LUKE’s research facilities; LUKE being the Natural Resources Institute Finland, a government led organisation that carries out research into agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. They are about to start a cow calf contact project this autumn, and so I was there to speak to Mikaela, a PhD candidate who is in the same CCC discussion group as me and all of the other young CCC researchers I have met on this trip.

The cathedral in Helsinki

Finland is a really interesting place. It is not technically Scandinavian (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and despite its Nordic label also has a lot in common language wise with its neighbour across the Gulf of Finland'; Estonia. Finnish is the singularly most complicated looking language that I have ever read. While the Scandinavian countries can mostly read and comprehend each other’s languages, Finnish belongs to an entirely separate family. My Rough Guide offered a few key phrases, but essentially said not to bother as it is too hard. Kudos to J.R.R. Tolkien, who not only appreciated the language for its lovely sound (it does sound nice!) but was clever enough to learn it, long before the Duolingo owl was there to help.

Finland also of course shares a land border with Russia, and some of the architecture does show that. Apparently Helsinki has doubled for St Petersburg when film crews haven’t been able to get in to Russia, and some of the newer buildings have a definite Soviet look.

Schools in Finland are still required to teach Swedish as a result of hundreds of years of occupation by their western neighbour, and parts of the country in the south west are Swedish speaking. Finns also learn English at school as a compulsory part of their curriculum, which means that the average person here has a working knowledge of three exceptionally different languages- before even considering that many will take an additional European language, and that the knowledge of Swedish gives you a basic comprehension of Norwegian and Danish. Overachievers, all of them.

Despite this Finnish people do seem to look up slightly to Sweden; somebody today told me that things are “usually better” there. It is certainly colder in Finland, the temperature here has dropped from over 20 degrees last week to below 10 today.

Beautiful Helsinki

Finland has one of the highest prevalences of coeliac disease in the world, which means that it is an absolute paradise of gluten free food. I even had a doughnut in Helsinki- from a very normal looking in-shopping mall doughnut seller. My first doughnut in over seven years. It was delicious.

The long train journey offered some great scenery; Finland has thousands of lakes of different sizes, and the train crossed them and skirted them as we travelled. We also passed a huge logging train taking timber south; Finland has a massive forestry industry and is one of the most densely forested countries in the world.

I am staying in the city of Kuopio, which is in the centre of Finland’s dairy industry. It is a couple of hours from the Russian border, four hours from Helsinki, and six hours from Juoksenki, which is a village on the Arctic circle. It also has a pretty cathedral, and it has a nice walk along the lakeshore.

Central Kuopio

The dairy industry is really important in Finland, and as such is the biggest livestock focus of LUKE, although they also cover pigs, poultry, reindeer, and fish, as well as forestry and other natural resources. There are specialist beef farms here, but around 80% of the beef consumed comes from the dairy herd. Quotas have been abolished and the average herd size is growing; there are no requirements here for grazing standard herds, so many are housed and the average milk yield per cow is over 10,000 litres. The country isn’t ideally suited for growing cereals, so this trend may not be sustainable.

Tie stalls are some way from being banned, so they still exist although they are being phased out as farms modernise. Tie stall farms do have a mandatory grazing period.

There are around 4,000 dairy herd in the country, going all the way up into the polar night. Around 5-6% of total production is organic, and the breed split is mostly Holsteins and Nordic Reds/Ayrshires with some indigenous breeds. Some of these are good dual purpose animals.

Milk is sold to a range of companies, and one of them- Valio- state on their website that they are Finland’s biggest food exporter, They are a farmer owned co-operative.

Kuopio Cathedral

LUKE’s cow calf contact project is due to start this autumn, but they did carry out a pilot in the spring to check their infrastructure and decide how the eventual research will be structured. That pilot used five cow calf pairs and worked on there being a “cow calf area” from which the cows could access the robot. The other cows were in a slatted area as usual. Cows had access to pasture in the day and were shut off from the robot while the station was unmanned in the night because of worries about calves getting into the main body of the shed.

The pilot didn’t collect data for statistical analysis, but observations found a high level of cross suckling =, and real variation in milk production to the robot for individual cows. Calves were introduced to whole milk through an automatic milk machine while they were still on the cows, and weaning from the cows happened earlier than the researchers would have liked because the cows were needed for a grazing trial.

The project this autumn will involve five cow-calf pairs, and will be replicated three times couples with three sets of five control cows. The work will look at welfare markers and performance, but will also involve the organisation’s economics department modelling the financial impact of cow calf contact. I can’t wait to see that.

They will wean the calve at eight weeks old and consider fenceline contact (different weaning strategies are one of the research focusses). They will also look at the impact of suckling versus bottle feeding colostrum, and measure the impact of suckling on a cow’s reproductive health through progesterone testing. The barn is set up with a camera to measure Body Condition Score and they can also detect ketosis through milk samples, so they will also look at the metabolic impact, plus ultrasound scanning the cows to check uterus recovery.

One of the end objectives will be a guidebook for Finnish farms considering CCC; there is growing interest in it and Mikaela is part of a Facebook group of over a 100 potential converts.

Calf at the research centre

The interest from Finnish farmers is particularly positive because in Finland strict rules on food safety make it very difficult to sell added value dairy products off farm. Any farmers who want to make the change to CCC will be doing so with the expectation that their milk price will not change. One of the milk buyers here is very supportive of the project at LUKE though, so potentially there will be some opportunities (or requirements) in the future.

The market for dairy bull calves here means that any system that grows them well is an incentive, and Mikaela also pointed out that heifer calves that are well fed produce more milk in their first lactation. This is the sort of thing that their economic modelling should analyse,

Lake Kallavesi in Kuopio. It has a surface area of 478km2 - for comparison Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the UK is 392km2, and Loch Lomond is 71km2

I am really looking forward to seeing the results of this work in Finland. In some ways they are a better representation of the UK than the other countries I have visited. The quota system in Norway means that their farms are exceptionally small, and infrastructure changes are often subsidised. Sweden doesn’t have the small herd sizes, but they do have a very wealthy (and equal) society which means that their opportunities for added value products are not necessarily comparable to the UK. In Finland they have the potential to increase production (because they’re not capped by quota) but they will need to run CCC systems within the financial parameters of a conventional milk price.

I may also be slightly biased in Finland’s favour because I learnt today that all of the cows- even those in the fairly big research facility- have names. Every year is assigned a different letter, and some cow families have themes. Two of the calves I saw at LUKE were named Udessa and Ulalaa as 2022 is “U”. Ulalaa is pronounced “ooh-la-la”. She may be my favourite.

Tomorrow I take the train back to Helsinki and fly to Manchester, finishing my tour of the Nordic countries. There are a couple of farms here that I didn’t get a chance to visit but I would like to speak to, therefore I may look to have some additional Zoom meetings. My next Nuffield stop is Chile in November, and then the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand in January!

Another view of the lake