Exhibitions
The Age of Agriculture – The Story of Farming in Finland
Agriculture and its environments have evolved over the millennia, and agriculture itself has created changes in its setting. This exhibition is a journey through the three-thousand-year history of farming in Finland. The age of agriculture is one of labour, cultivated species, domesticated animals, arable fields, burn-cleared swidden plots and pastures; it is a landscape. The age of agriculture has a beginning, but no end. The exhibition has its ending, but the age of agriculture lives on.
You can also access the exhibition virtually.
Before Machines
Before Machines displays the farm work and related tools and implements of the era before agricultural machinery. In the age before machines, grain was sown by hand from baskets and bushels and human hands would cut the ripened grain with sickles and bind it in sheaves, make thread and yard from wool and flax with spindles, and use the axes that cleared slash-and-burn plots and felled timber for building. Draught animals helped in the heavy work in the fields. There was plenty of work to do and everyone was needed, from children to the elderly.
This exhibition is based on the collections of the former Museum of Agriculture of the University of Helsinki at Viikki in Helsinki. The oldest items among the over 600 exhibits date from the 18th century. Along with work in the fields, the exhibition presents animal husbandry, work in the farmhouse and the farmyard and the auxiliary livelihoods of hunting, fishing, forestry and various handicrafts.
You can also access the exhibition virtually.
What a machine!
In Finland, the mechanization of agriculture began more than 150 years ago. The war postponed the breakthrough of mechanization until the early 1960s, when the amount of work done by tractors overtook the work done by horses. The area under cultivation and the number of farm animals began to increase dramatically. At the same time, animal care became easier with the introduction of milking machines and automatic feeders, for example. Since the late 1980s, farmers have been required to invest more in machinery, to move to digital environments and to train and educate themselves more.
Our exhibition guides you through the impacts of mechanization on the fields, the barn, the machine shed and on a farmer’s everyday work. Join the Meronen family and see how their lives as farmers has changed from 1953 to this current day.
