The early years of modern Finnish agriculture

Abstract

Abstract Finnish social studies have recently begun to concentrate rather less upon the old traditional agricultural community and to investigate the profound changes in urban and rural society at the turn of the century. In this book, Veikko Anttila has examined agricultural change during this period, but the title is a little deceptive, since it is only concerned with a part of the process of change, viz. the extension and adoption of technical innovations in agriculture. Moreover it deals mainly with innovations in crop cultivation, and since the emphasis in the Finnish farm economy was shifting at that time from crop cultivation to stock-raising and forestry, the work is in fact a specialised study of one aspect of agricultural modernisation in Finland. The few references to innovations in the field of stock-raising tend to interrupt the study rather than contribute to its thesis.