Before horses became common, oxen were used as draught animals in the fields. The breadth of a team of oxen yoked to the plough meant that strips of field had to be wide to offer the oxen room to turn at the end. In the open field system, work progressed strip by strip throughout the village. Each house reaped the harvest from its own strip, and decisions were made jointly.

Work did not always progress smoothly. Because the individual strips were so narrow, all work across the entire field had to be carried out at the same time. The same type of grain had to be grown throughout the field, and work had to progress simultaneously. This caused problems between slower and faster workers. Strips also tended to become narrower – if a farm was divided, the strips were also divided. This caused problems for the oxen, as they no longer had enough room to turn at the end of the strip without treading on the neighbour’s harvest.

Slash-and-burn farming was a labour-intensive yet potentially rewarding cultivating method.

Trees had been felled at midsummer the previous year. Now a fire was lit by friction, by rubbing two sticks of wood against each other. The fire was steered upwind to keep it better under control. Once the felled trunks had burned down and the ashes had cooled, seeds were planted.

Since the nutrients in a slash-and-burn fields land gave out after two harvests, new patches of forest had to be cleared continuously. In western Finland, slash-and-burn farming gave way to field-based cultivation before the 18th century land reform. When forests were divided between individual landowners, the areas available for slash-and-burn farming became scarce even in eastern Finland. This meant dire straits for the landless, who could no longer clear fields in the forests.

The slash-and-burn method clashed with new thinking, according to which burning down trees that could be refined and sold was simply wasteful.

During the famine, beggars flocked to the densely populated areas in search of their daily bread. Mortality rates were the highest in these areas.

In 1866 the dependence on fields revealed its weak spot. A cold and rainy summer was followed by a famine, ‘the great hunger years’, during which the population of Finland dwindled by hundreds of thousands. Weakened by cold and hunger, the people were susceptible to epidemics which were the main cause of death during the famine.

Before the emergence of the hunger crisis, population growth had driven people to settle in even the most outlying areas. The famine showed that the limits of growth had been achieved in this respect. Increasing the harvest could no longer be based on clearing new land for cultivation; instead, smaller fields had to be made to yield a better harvest.

An agricultural reform was called for. Tradition had to give way to agricultural machinery and automation.

Before the 19th-century land reforms, the principal buildings on a farm were located close together. In the 19th century, outhouses were moved further away from the main building and farmers also moved out of the village to live on their own land. This house in Vöyri in Ostrobothnia was moved to its present location in 1938.

The arrival of a new harvester was an event which the entire village gathered to witness. It was said that the new owner had sold wood from his forests to purchase the machine all the way from England. The contraption was supposed to beat almost any number of men working with sickles.

The rural landscape underwent many other changes in the last few decades of the 19th century. The advent of heavy machinery necessitated larger fields, and soil had to be reinforced by means of drainage. Landowners finally came to recognise the advantages of the land reform. Neighbouring strips of land were combined to form larger fields, and many landowners erected new, often more handsome farmhouses overlooking their fields.

Having purchased a new harvester, the farmer could view his fields with an easy mind. On the other hand, the crofter labouring on his field faced an uncertain future – he was only allowed to farm the field until the farmer decided otherwise.

The purpose of the land reform was to give everyone access to a small patch of land for their own use. Land surveyors are carrying out an assessment survey.

The purpose of agricultural reforms carried out in the second half of the 19th century was to increase the grain yield, not by expanding the cultivated areas but rather by increasing the harvest obtained from existing fields. The average farm size continued to decrease due to social factors, however. The number of crofters farming leased fields grew and the position of landowners grew ever stronger.

Subsistence was always uncertain for the landless population, and the problems culminated at the beginning of the new century. The government was forced to carry out the land reform which had been long in planning. Ownership of a piece of land, however small, relieved the burden of scratching a living. Small farms continued to struggle, however, and seldom was the harvest bountiful enough to allow the farmer excess produce to sell on the market.

Giving out land to those willing to farm it and allowing people to settle in virgin land were widely used measures of social policy long into the post-war era. A small house with a small potato field continued to offer a basic livelihood.

Migration into towns all but depopulated the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s.

The idea of the field as the main source of livelihood remained unquestioned for so long that when the agricultural economy finally came to an end, the impact was hard. The growing mountains of butter in warehouses were a tangible indicator of the changing times: more butter was produced than could be sold. Only recently achieved, self-sufficiency had already turned to overproduction.

In the 1960s, only two decades after the survivors of the war had cleared fields of their own, many farms went out of business as the farmers took the government subsidy offered to those who voluntarily let their fields lie fallow. Often this was indeed the only option: the original settlers had reached retirement age, and the younger generation had moved into town years before. Agriculture became less and less common as the main source of living.

Ideally, the outhouses on a farm are surrounded by fields.

Our rural landscape continues to change further. The acreage of cultivated land, at its largest in the 1960s, has decreased, yet the average size of farms has increased. The trend has been towards specialised intensive production.

As farmers have bought or rented fields, their holdings have increased in size, yet individual fields may be scattered far and wide. This causes much travel between the fields. On the east coast, for example, a farmer travelling to and fro among his fields may cover a distance each year that corresponds to the circumference of the Earth.

The process of combining outlying strips of land into a single farm that began with the 18th-century land reform is still ongoing. New land rearrangements reflect the changes brought about by globalisation, contemporary efficiency-based approaches, and centuries-old landowning traditions and their associated emotional ties.

Since Finland joined the EU, our agricultural policy has steered the development towards even larger farms and rational production, which has sparked lively dialogue on all levels of society. The field is still respected as an element of the landscape and the source of everyday bread.