1 - Introduction

Summary

This is a book about family farms and farming families. It is focussed upon eastern Finland, where I carried out some fifteen months of fieldwork between 1980 and 1982, but its relevance is not simply restricted to that area. From very early times until quite recently, a large proportion of the world's population has engaged in family farming, and it is probable that a small majority still does so despite the pace and spread of industrialisation. Of course, not all family farming systems are the same. They vary greatly in the details of their property system and inheritance patterns, and in the size and structure of their working units. They also differ in the technology which is available to them and, partly concomitant with this, in the degree and form of their involvement in a wider polity and economy. At the same time there are, not surprisingly, a number of broad similarities between many if not all such farming systems, based as they are upon a combination of land holdings and collaborating groups of kin. Such similarities and differences have been of interest to me in my work in Finland, not least because my previous research was carried out among farming families in the very different setting of East Africa.

As in much of the developed world, the level of mechanisation in Finnish farming is noticeably high, and this has crucial implications for the size of unit that can manage a viable farm under modern economic conditions in that country.