The family farm is an organic livestock farm in the south of Finland. We have over 700ha of cultivated land.

In total, there is over 400 head of stock. This includes about 150 polled Limousin cows, as well as followers and bulls. We also have approximately 350 Texel ewes.

On the farm we have our own slaughterhouse and farmshop. We sell nearly all of our animals directly to consumers.

We’ve just had one of the busiest weeks of the year in the farm shop because Easter is a very big season for lamb.

On the farm side, our first calves have been born this year and lambing will start any day now.

We still have 15cm to 20cm of snow in the fields, so it will be another three weeks before fieldwork begins.

Last year was the worst year in farming since 1987 due to the weather conditions. Many farmers like myself couldn’t harvest some fields at all, so we lost all the crops we planned to sell to industry.

We also never got to finalise fieldwork last year so this spring there is more work to be done than usual. A lack of money is a big problem on farms all over the country at the moment.

However, there are also lots of opportunities and I’m very optimistic about the future.

More and more people are becoming interested in what they eat and some of them are willing to pay a little extra if they know, for example, where their food comes from. And we all know Finnish food is the safest and cleanest food in the world.

We’re also very proud that our animal welfare situation is so much better than average in the EU. For example, our pigs do not have their tails docked, chickens do not have their beaks clipped and there is zero salmonella. We will see in the future that the rest of the EU needs to follow our lead.

We are hoping that the next Common Agricultural Policy will be fair and focus on those who really produce something, the active farmer.

The EU and next CAP have to recognise that conditions across the EU can be totally different in member states but policy should work well in all of them. Hopefully the next CAP will be flexible enough to allow farmers to be creative and develop their farms as they want and as markets want us to do.

Regulations like animal welfare rules must be equal in the EU. If we want to have common markets we should have the same requirements.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how the next CAP will support young people getting into the sector. We need to have more young farmers and the EU can again learn from Finland on that front.

The next CAP will have to make sure that all active farmers will have fair income and encourage us to be proud what we do every day.

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