The European Commission organized a trip to Finland for the press last October to which Agrodigital.com had the opportunity to participate. Finland is the country that holds the EU presidency. One of the visits was to Jan de la Chapelle’s dairy farm, which he manages with his wife and son’s help. It is an operation with 345 cows and calves, of which 190 are in production. It has 2,100 ha of which 140 ha are of pastures, 80 ha of cereal, 1,500 ha of forest and the rest of stones field.

It is located in an unrivaled place, as it is surrounded by the Baltic Sea and it is located in Lindö Gard. They are the sixth generation in the farm since the first De la Chapelle arrived to Finland from France, Belgium or the Netherlands (it is not known exactly).

Jan de la Chapelle explained that his cows produce an average of 12,000 l / year and that they are fed with what the farm itself produces: barley, oats and grass. It has 3 milking robots. Five Ukrainian employees work and live in the farm. De la Chapelle is very happy about them. Like most Finnish farmers, he delivers the milk at the Valio cooperative, which is 114 years old and has more than 5,100 farmers. They receive an average milk price of 35.6 cents / kg. It produces about 2 million liters of milk every year.

The Russian embargo remains a serious problem for the Finnish dairy sector. They share a border with Russia, which has traditionally been the main customer of Finnish milk. Jan de la Chapelle has calculated that this embargo is costing him about 100,000 euros a year. When the embargo began, there was some support from the European Commission but now there is no help any more but the Russian veto still stands. De la Chapelle regrets  that no one remembers the embargo, except farmers like him who are suffering it.

When he was asked if his son would become the seventh generation at the head of the farm, our host pointed out that in Finland, the continuity of farms is very difficult due to inheritance taxes. They are so high, that in order to pay them, they need to sell part or all of the farm. This is a demand that for years, the agricultural sector is raising the Finnish government, in order to facilitate the continuity of Finnish farms from one generation to another, without the need to have to divide the farms to pay taxes.

In the opinion of Jan de la Chapelle, nowadays, Finnish farms, especially dairy farms,  have to diversify their sources of income in order to survive. In his case, his farm would have to close if the only live from milk income. The farm annual turnover is about € 1.5 million per year. Milk only represents the 40% of the total income. The forest is an important source of income, not only through the wood (which represents 20% of total income) but also by hunting (10%). To diversify , Jan de la Chapelle has also chosen rural tourism, renting several houses on his farm (15% of income). EU subsidies account for the remaining 10%.