Last year, farms and horticultural enterprises employed about 145,000 people. The total number of working days accumulated was 22 million. The source of the information on the labour force on farms and in horticultural enterprises is the Farm Structure Survey conducted by Tike. The survey also examined other business activities on farms, the share of which is almost the same as in 2005. The results now published also include those of commercial greenhouses, unlike in previous years.

Employee numbers declined by a fifth in the 2000s
In 2007, farms and horticultural enterprises employed about 145,000 farm family members or permanently employed persons, which is about 10,000 fewer than in 2005. After the turn of the millennium, the number of people working in agriculture has declined by more than one fifth. Most of the decline concerns the workforce on family farms. The main reason for the decline in agricultural labour force is the decline in farm numbers. The reduction in the need for labour has been affected by a change in production structure: the number of livestock farms, which require proportionately more labour, has continued to decline.

More personnel on cereal farms, more working hours on dairy farms
In terms of personnel numbers, the biggest employers are cereal farms: a total of 50,800 farm family members or permanently employed persons participated in the work of cereal farms in 2007. Next in terms of labour were dairy farms, 35,300 persons. In terms of the amount of work, dairy farms are clearly more labour-intensive than those with other lines of production. Workers on dairy farms completed 9.7 million working days, and on cereal farms 3.5 million working days. The third most labour-intensive production sector was enterprises in the horticultural sector. Overall, about 22 million working days were put in on farms and in horticultural enterprises in 2007. On average, this was equivalent to a little over 7 hours of work per farm and horticultural enterprise every day of the year, which was a little less than in 2005.


Most other business activity on cereal farms
About one third of Finnish farms are involved in business activities other than agriculture or forestry. The share has dropped slightly, by about one percentage unit, from the 2005 results. The most common business activity is contracting.


Of farmers on family farms, 63 percent carried out forestry work in 2007, and almost a third of farmers used working time on the other business activities of the farm. Division of working hours between the different jobs varies greatly both in terms of production sector and size group of farms. On livestock farms, the working hours spent in agricultural work account for about 90 percent of the total working hours. On cereal farms, 27 percent of the working hours is spent in other business activities. Proportionally, the most forestry work is done on cereal farms and those specialised in other plant production.


Farm family does bulk of the work, number of foreigners remained static
The farm family still does the bulk of the work on farms. In 2007, farm family members did 84 percent of the agricultural and horticultural work on farms. The importance of both permanently employed and seasonal labour is clearly the greatest on farms specialised in horticulture, where, for example, the work input of temporary labour is a quarter of the total work input.


Finnish farms and horticultural enterprises employed about 14,700 foreign workers in 2007, i.e. almost the same number as in 2005. Foreign workers were employed by more than 2,000 farms and horticultural enterprises. Foreign workers are mostly used as seasonal labour. Of the foreign labour, two thirds worked on farms specialised in horticulture.


Computer aids work
About 82 percent of farms had a computer, and about 78% of them had access to the Internet. The most common connection type was broadband (83%). The computer was used both for the private household and agricultural bookkeeping. The number of computers on farms would seem to be growing at the rate of a couple of percent per annum: since 2005, growth has amounted to 4 percent. In 2007, a small sample of farms was offered the option for the first time of filling in the Farm Structure Survey form online.


Horticultural enterprises included in the data
The data for the Farm Structure Survey was collected in September-November 2007. The data was collected from about 33,600 farms and horticultural enterprises, which is almost half of Finnish farms and horticultural enterprises. For horticultural enterprises, the information of the Farm Structure Survey will be published in summer 2008 in the Horticultural Enterprise Register. The data now released is advance information. The final information will be published in autumn 2008.


The 2007 Farm Structure Survey is the first time the data for both farms and horticultural enterprises is published together. This corresponds to the definition of a farm used by the EU, so the data now published is comparable to that of the other EU countries. The difference from data previously published in Finland is that now purely greenhouse enterprises are also included in the target group. In 2007, there were 1,075 greenhouse enterprises in Finland, which according to the Farm Register were not farms. Consequently, the information is not directly comparable with previously published data.
The time series of the attached tables have been modified to correspond to the target group used here. This time series data is also preliminary, as the data from previous years has been re-estimated, and not all the data has yet been fully checked.


Additional information
Esa Katajamäki, tel. +358 (0)20 77 21237 or firstname.lastname@mmmtike.fi
Irene Mustalahti, tel. +358 (0)20 77 21340 or firstname.lastname@mmmtike.fi