IFAJ 45^th Annual Congress 8-13 September 2001, Savonlinna, Finland

Agricultural Portals

Aimo Tiilikainen

Managing Director

company: Farmit Website Oy,

The www.farmit.net portal unites the services of 11 leading agricultural and forestry sector companies on a single website in Finland

A product of business networking, the Farmit portal is an assembly of electronic services for agricultural and forestry companies in Finland. These target groups have access to the electronic services of 11 leading agricultural and forestry companies through the single Farmit portal, which is currently comprised of 2000 webpages.

The Farmit portal services are provided by leading (based on market share and annual turnover) Finnish companies in the agricultural and forestry sectors. They are:

Kemira Agro Oy

Sonera Oyj

Suomen Rehu Oy

Osuuspankkiryhmä

Metsäliitto Osuuskunta

Movere Oy

Partek Nordkalk Oyj

Boreal Kasvinjalostus Oy

Kustannusosakeyhtiö Metsälehti

Suonentieto Oy

Viljavuuspalvelu Oy

Farmit portal operations and the production of services are co-ordinated and managed by Farmit Website Oy, a corporation specifically formed for this purpose.

The current standard offering of the Farmit portal includes comprehensive service packages for animal husbandry, plant cultivation, soil improvement, cultivability studies and forestry. The benefit provided farm operators by these packages is the availability of data required for production planning from a single source, which eliminates the need to consult a wide variety of guides, brochures or separate electronic service channels.

Farmit also offers an updating service, which can be provided quickly to agricultural operators via the Internet. For example, FarmitSää uses radar images and satellite transmissions to track precipitation fronts, with hourly updates providing information on rainfall for specific regions. During the summer months, the Crop Disease Predictor service monitors the status of crop diseases in different regions of Finland and releases provincial crop disease predictions and preventative measure recommendations once a week.

Interactive production planning services is Farmit’s third focal point. This service provides tools and programmes for planning lime and fertiliser applications as well as the choice of varieties. Production profitability comparison tools for livestock farms are also available. The common denominator of all these services is that the farm operator can get answers to fertiliser and lime questions concerning his own production conditions, such as the soil type or composition of a particular plot.

In June of 2001 Farmit services were utilised by nearly 50,000 users (In Finland approximately 37,000 farm operators are online, i.e. they have access to the Internet). There are approximately 12,000 registered users, which farm approximately 25% of the total arable land in Finland. The average registered user farms 54 hectares (national average approx. 26 ha). In practice this means that particularly the large farms use Farmit services.

Aimo Tiilikainen

Managing Director

company: Farmit Website Oy,

Ph.D. in Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (marketing)