June 26, 2023

Finland AKIS | Updates on the different AKIS

AKIS Overview

Within this AKIS Overview we focus on agriculture. As forestry is a large sector in Finland, there are various actors that are not reported here.

Advisory organizations are private, although some governmental funding still exists. Agricultural education system has 27 vocational education institutes with school farms/gardens, 7 universities of applied sciences (6 Finnish speaking, 1 Swedish speaking), 1 university providing master and doctoral degrees in agriculture.

Several research institutes support agriculture, some very small and production-field specific. Bi-annual Agricultural Sciences Days are an important dissemination forum and meeting point for Finnish agriculture actors. Farmers’ unions and societies have an important role on supporting peer-to-peer learning. Agricultural and food industry do have also their own research, advisory, and consultancy services. Administration is regionalized to implement CAP. 

A considerable effort in advice, training and innovation is needed to accompany the transition to more resilient and sustainable agriculture and rural areas.

According to the country report of i2connect project, AKIS in Finland should improve dissemination of research results and strengthen co-operation.

AKIS Coordination Bodies

AKIS coordination body is AgriHubi – farmers’ competence network, which is located into Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). Coordination team in Luke has following resources to with the coordination and supporting coordination work:

• Coordinator
• Communications specialist
• Professor, foresight
• Senior scientist, smart farming
• Senior scientist, agricultural products’ markets and export

Furthermore, AgriHubi’s coordination team has specialist from agricultural vocational education supporting coordination and development of vocational education and communication specialist from university of applied sciences support cooperation among the higher education and research bodies.

AKIS coordination operates with various working groups where common challenges of knowledge flow and cooperation improvement are tackled. Following working groups are on-going:

• Steering group
• Communication group
• AKIS -group
• Education actors (added with advisory and research bodies)
• Smart farming
• Project planners focusing on agriculture and food

AKIS coordination has extremely close collaboration with managing authority Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as well as Rural Network Finland (CAP network). Where AgriHubi focuses especially on agriculture and horticulture related issues, Rural Network Finland has topics such as rural businesses, forestry, Leader, and innovations.

AgriHubi and Rural Network Finland develop together common networking platform www.maaseutuverkosto.fi / Agrihubi.fi, which already has multiple services for farmers and stakeholders. This platform develops further on with adding practice-ready knowledge reservoir.

CAP Strategic Priorities

There are three priorities in Finland’s CAP plan:

• Promoting active food production
• Diversified rural areas capable of renewal
• Climate and environment smart agriculture.

For the AKIS, Finland has set the following policy objective:

• The use of research and good practices as well as enhanced competence bring added value to farms and other rural enterprises.

Find the full AKIS country report here.