Ascension Day is a national holiday in Finland. We are all having a day off. I drove my daughter to Laune Family Park to spend some time with an old friend of hers from the district of the city, Ahtiala, we lived in before moving out of there. My wife and I visited Kinnari Farm, one of the oldest continously operated farms in the region. Kinnari Farm has been owned by the same family since 1667. There is a cafeteria and a small farm shop. The same owners also own a small mill, Okeroisten mylly the products of which were sold in the shop. There was also a small selection of flowers, pots and other gardening paraphernalia.
I met the current owner of the farm at the shop. He told me he had owned since 2004. The farm has 220 hectares of land and has rented some fields. The average farms size in Finland was 44 hectares in 2015. The average size has been growing because farming is very capital intensive and because profit margins are very thin. When I asked him whether it was necessary to invest in more field hectares or other activities he said that one should still be very careful about investements and not just invest for investment's sake. The tourism business is under a separate company and the farm itself has fields for growing crops, forests and sand and gravel pits. Okeroinen mill is also owned by the farm.
The cafeteria and the farm shop were in that building.
Entrance to the cafeteria and shop with some of the merchandise on display
Economical use of space. A combine harvester shares this space with the gardening paraphrenalia for sale. This is where the owner greeted us and where we had a chat.
The grain is dried and stored in this building, I think.
The grain must is loaded for transport towards a mill via that tube.