Situational awareness and composure for cultivating peat fields

In this blog, Sauli Immonen, a farming advisor and trainer at the MAA-akatemia, provides background on the special role of peatlands in Finland and considers a practical, situation-aware and moderate approach to changes in peatland cultivation.

You can learn the latest information and practical innovative methods for cultivating peat fields from the (2026) Future of Peat Fields training, where in addition to Sauli, trainers include Philipp Mayer and Erkki Vihonen.

Is today's farmer a climate villain?

Is the farmer of the 2020s really a climate villain? There are fewer than 40,000 farms in Finland today, and it is good to remember that none of them could have influenced our country's history or the formation of peatlands thousands of years ago.

The history of peatlands goes back far beyond the Ice Age. Our first tree species was birch about 11,500 years ago, and pine followed a thousand years later. As the climate warmed, nobler tree species also appeared for thousands of years. However, the cooler period that began about 5,000 years ago accelerated the peatland development. At that time, spruce, which thrives in cool conditions, settled in our nature and took over from nobler trees.

It was in this cool, wet environment that peat began to form, as organic matter did not have time to decompose before it was submerged in water. The decomposition of plants in cold, wet conditions is slow, which is the basis for our present-day peatlands.

Humans and beavers shaping water bodies

There are two species on Earth that want to regulate the height of water bodies for their own needs: beavers and humans. Beavers started this work first, and humans later adopted the same skill.

In Finland, the lowering of lakes was prohibited until 1740, when a new bog decree allowed it to be used to clear agricultural land and improve pastures. State policy at the time included the lowering of lakes, draining bogs, and clearing rapids. These measures were aimed at ensuring a safer harvest when the risk of frost threatened, and even improving the climate as a whole.

From this period we remember historical figures such as the vicar of Pielisjärvi, Jakob Stenius the Elder, known as "Korpi-Jaakko", who cleared the bogs for fields in the 18th century. His son, Jakob Stenius the Younger, known as "Koski-Jaakko", continued his work on rapids removal and lowering of waterways. His most famous project was the lowering of Höytiäinen in the 19th century, when the lake level dropped by 9.5 meters and new land was exposed almost the area of Helsinki. The great flood year of 1867 accelerated this development even further, and in total over 3,000 lake lowerings have been carried out in Finland.

Forestry and international comparison

We are a bog country by European standards: about a third of our land is peatland. Almost half of this was once drained for forestry needs. The background was the situation at the beginning of the 20th century, when only a handful of Europeans (0.5%) were Finnish, but our sawn timber exports accounted for a whopping 20 percent of all European trade. When forest resources dwindled, the drainage of bogs began to secure growth – at that time, greenhouse gas emissions were not on anyone's mind.

Although Finland is a small emitter globally, the situation is different when it comes to peatlands. Our emissions are only about 0.5 percent of China's emissions, but our peatland emissions are more than a quarter of China's. We are tenth in the world in terms of carbon dioxide emissions from peatlands. This is a great opportunity for us: we can significantly influence climate change by examining the ways in which peatlands are used.

Towards sustainable solutions

In peat fields, the most effective way to reduce emissions is to adjust the groundwater level to a higher level than normal, which can be achieved with controlled drainage, wells or dams. By changing crop choices, we can switch to wetland farming and favor long crop rotations, which reduces the need for tillage. The most marginal fields can also be restored as wetlands or afforested.

It is important to remember that today's farmers are not responsible for the decisions of past centuries, and blaming them will not help. Peatlands were still being cleared significantly after World War II with political encouragement. Today, however, Finnish farms have a real opportunity to be part of the solution. We have significant emissions potential in peatlands that we can cut. We just need to be able to provide farms with the right information, incentives and tools so that we can turn development onto a sustainable path.