Wheat harvest larger than oat for the first time in a century

On the average, the Finnish grain crop harvest has been over four billion kilograms every other year in the 2000s. In 2014, this figure was exceeded for the seventh time. For the first time in the over hundred years that crop statistics have been compiled in Finland, the wheat crop was slightly larger than that of oat. In recent years, barley, wheat and oat crops have been sufficient to enable exporting. The same does not apply to rye.

The year 2014 was a turning point in the production amounts of various kinds of grain in Finland: the wheat crop was slightly larger than the oat crop. Both crops exceeded a billion kilograms. Barley was still the most commonly cultivated grain. Almost half of the total grain crop of four billion kilograms consisted of barley. The majority of the crops are used by the Finnish livestock industry.

The rye crop tripled from the previous year, yet at 75 million kilograms the crop was much smaller than that of the three most commonly cultivated grains. Rye is used for bread, and to cover Finland's domestic consumption, its production should be over hundred million kilograms.

Organic grain requires almost twice the land

The percentage of the organic grain crop was 50–60% of the conventionally cultivated grain crop, calculated from the average for the entire country. Thus, to produce equal amounts of grain, the acreage needed in organic cultivation is almost twice that needed in conventional cultivation. However, the share or organic grain of the cultivated acreage in Finland is only around 4%.

The share of organic grain of the entire grain crop is approximately 2%. Of the entire crops for each grain, the proportion of the organically grown crop was largest for rye: nearly 12% of the crop was produced organically. When judging by production amounts, oat was produced organically more than any other grain: approximately 40 million kilograms of oats were produced organically. This was about 4% of the entire Finnish oat crop.

A good sugar beet harvest

The sugar beet crop was the largest in three years, approximately 46 tons per hectare. The total sugar beet yield was well over 600 million kilograms.

The rape crop, on the other hand, was considerably smaller than the previous year, now for the fourth year in a row. The crop of 33 million kilograms was only 20% of the crop in 2010.

Farms submitting information dutifully

In 2014, information was requested from 6,000 farms involved in conventional cultivation and 1,000 farms involved in organic cultivation. On the basis of the sample information, the crop data for the most important field crops was calculated regionally for all of the approximately 53,000 farms in Finland.