Collaboration between Estonian and Finnish Operational Groups 

Joint bilingual webinar to farmers, advisers and veterinarians 

Estonian and Finnish Operational Groups have been working together for several years on the topics of animal health, biosensor development and silage quality. Dairy farmers and industry in these two countries can learn a lot from each other, they form an effective duo for developing further the dairy farming production and practices in both countries. 

The largest Estonian dairy farms numbers of cows can reach 2000. In Finland, dairy farms, although very modern, are typically run by one family, and farms of over 500 hundred cows are very few. Despite these differences, Production and effectiveness in both cases have been optimised thanks to their exchanges. Although these are two neighbouring countries and their languages are related, Estonian and Finns are not able to understand each other. To enable farmers to learn about work done in both countries, through EIP-AGRI Operational Group projects the Estonian Dairy Cluster and the University Oulu organised a fully bilingual webinar in January 2022 entitled “Bovine health and quality of feed – new solutions in Finland and Estonia”. With the support of the Estonian National Rural Network Support Unit, all presentations were recorded beforehand in Finnish and Estonian, and discussions after talks were translated simultaneously. The webinar is an example of how remote connections can offer opportunities for international collaboration, saving time and resources. 

The webinar presented three Finnish and two Estonian cattle farming solutions. Finnish topics focused on the use of antimicrobial peptides in the maintenance of udder health, monitoring the level of dry matter of feed and temperature measurements of silage stocks with sensor rods. Solutions were developed in Smartfeed and Good for cattle Operational Groups by the Unit of Measurement Technology, Häme University of Applied Sciences and the Natural Resources Institute. The Estonian speakers presented developed technologies and results of the research work related to the diagnosis of mastitis and the automatic body condition scoring of cattle. The work was carried out in Operational Group projects led by the Estonian Dairy Cluster and the Estonian University of Life Sciences.

The Estonian National Rural Network Support Unit and Finnish Rural Network jointly took care of publicising the event within their networks, and in Finland, the Farmers’ Union MTK also widely shared the information about the webinar on social media. Translations and interpretation were done by two Finnish veterinarians who had studied in Estonia. 

The webinar brought together over 60 participants from Finland and over 40 from Estonia. 

The recording of the webinar here (in Estonian/Finnish).

Estonian Dairy Cluster

University Oulu 

Text source: Pekka Kilpeläinen, University of Oulu

Previous EIP-AGRI article about this collaboration here.