Down the Shit River

The air smelled of manure as we lowered our rented kayaks into the Aura River. The lowlands were wrapped in mist, but the warmth of the early morning promised a hot day ahead.
We were in Pöytyä, at the place where the official Aura paddling route is supposed to begin. Yet it was hard to recognize it as any kind of route. As soon as we sat in the kayaks, a dense thicket of horsetail plants towered above our heads. Before long, we were stuck in the mud and in the tangled stems of the plants.
Water was flowing somewhere beneath the vegetation, but that was of little use to us now—the mass of lake horsetail had grown so thick it supported our kayaks on top of it.
Our plan was to paddle the navigable part of the Aura River—just under 60 kilometres—from the village of Haveri, in Pöytyä, to the seaside city of Turku. Along the way, we would observe the river, meet people, and interview experts on nutrient emissions.
The 70-kilometre-long Aura River suffers from a serious nutrient problem. Large amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen run off from fields into the river, causing eutrophication that ultimately spreads to the Baltic Sea.
During the spring, we had been working with a group of European journalists to investigate how livestock manure affects the environment. Across Europe, there are regions deeply troubled by manure: the “pig belt” of Lower Saxony in Germany, the northwestern coast of Brittany in France, and, well, pretty much all of the Netherlands.
On the map of Finland, the Aura River basin stands out as particularly problematic. The reasons are many.
First, livestock farms here are expanding unusually fast, causing manure to pile up in certain areas to the point of becoming a burden. Second, the fields in the region are already so heavily fertilized that they can no longer absorb the nutrients found in manure. The result: nutrients constantly leach into the river. Climate change accelerates the process.
On paper, the Aura River’s condition looked worrying. We had set out to see what that meant in practice.
Soon after getting on the water, we came upon a large aspen tree that had fallen across the river channel. The banks were far too steep and muddy to climb while pulling our heavy kayaks, and there was no way to squeeze underneath the trunk. The only option was to hoist the kayaks—packed with all our gear—over the tree.
Somehow, we managed: one of us clambered onto the top of the tree to pull while the other pushed from behind. Mud splashed, our grips slipped, the kayak tilted nearly upright—there was a real sense of danger in the air. Inch by inch, the kayak rose over the trunk. A few final heaves, and the weight shifted. The bow slid uncontrollably toward what barely resembled a river.
Victory!
Then it was time for the second kayak.
We had calculated that we could cover about 30 kilometres by dinnertime, reaching the border between the municipalities of Aura and Lieto.
Two hours had passed, and we had managed to wade only 850 metres through the overgrown channel.
“It’s bound to get easier soon,” we told each other.
But it didn’t.

X

The Aura River begins in the small municipality of Oripää, where it emerges from springs in a gravel ridge area. Oripää is an agricultural community: a third of its residents make their living from primary production. In municipal elections, the pro-farmer Centre Party’s support exceeds 40 percent. The party’s former chair, Annika Saarikko, lives in Oripää and serves as the vice-chair of the municipal council. (Saarikko also has a home in Espoo, but when talking to journalists she has always preferred to present her house in Oripää.)
Each year, about 18 million kilos of pig manure are produced in Oripää, and the amount is growing. If that manure were divided equally among all the residents of Oripää, each would receive nearly 14 tonnes.
After leaving Oripää, the Aura River flows through the municipalities of Pöytyä, Aura, Lieto, and Kaarina before reaching the Archipelago Sea in Turku. Every year, the municipalities along the river produce 207 million kilos of livestock manure. Most of it comes from pigs and cows, and just under one-fifth from chickens.
Not all manure is the same. Chicken manure, once composted and dried, becomes granular and easy to handle. It can conveniently be transported to fields as fertilizer or sold to gardening companies, which bag it up for hobby gardeners to enjoy.
Pig manure is something else entirely: a repulsive sludge known as slurry. It’s a mix of phosphorus-rich feces, nitrogen-rich urine, and the washing water from pigsties. It does work as fertilizer, but using it is expensive and laborious, since it requires tank trucks for transport and spraying equipment for spreading. For cost reasons, it doesn’t make sense to transport pig slurry further than about twenty kilometres from the farm. If no one nearby wants it, it becomes hazardous waste.
No one knows exactly what livestock farmers do with all this manure. But water-quality measurements tell us that somewhere, nutrients from it are finding their way into the Aura River. The river carries them into the Archipelago Sea, where the nutrients fuel a severe environmental crisis.

X

Already on the first morning, we discovered that there were three ways to make progress through the dense vegetation that had taken over the river.
The first was “the gondolier.” In this technique, the paddler plants their paddle vertically beside the kayak and uses it to push off from the muddy riverbed or the tangled mass of plants—whatever happens to be underneath at the time.
In “the wheelchair push” the paddler doesn’t use a paddle at all but uses their hands instead. You reach forward, grab a firm handful of plants, and use them like handles. With one determined pull, you can haul the kayak forward by as much as a metre.
Often there were so many plants that we ended up walking on top of them, using a long leash to drag the kayak. We called that “walking the pony.”
Like ponies, our kayaks were alternately clumsy and nimble, with soft movements and stubborn tempers. They kept veering off course to bury their noses in the bushes. We led them through rocks and horsetail thickets, under, over, and past countless fallen trees. Before long, our kayaks were coated in aquatic plants, mud, spiders, and snails.
Little by little, we learned to recognize which parts of the thicket might be passable. Horsetail laid flat? Shallow—good for towing. Pink-flowered hedge woundwort? Muddy and full of annoying tussocks to get stuck between—avoid. Yellow irises, or tall horsetail growing upright? A good sign—try paddling there!
At times, the river flowed freely enough for us to sit in our kayaks and paddle normally. Yellow water lilies grew in the current, their stems covered in brown slime. Himalayan balsam bloomed on the banks: an invasive species, escaped from gardens, that grows fast and smothers native plants. Behind their fragrant mounds we heard the sound of tractors.
We drifted into a spruce forest where erosion had carved the sandy soil into a deep, winding channel for the river. The massive spruces growing on the outer bends had their knotted roots exposed where the water had washed the soil away. They looked like mangroves.
More than a dozen spruces had fallen across the river. Getting past each one took time and sapped our strength. One of the trunks bore the marks of a saw—perhaps someone had once tried to save the old paddling route but given up.
The day grew hot and uncomfortably humid for Finland. Our bangs stuck to our sweaty skin, and an unpleasant smell saturated our hands: a mix of mud, resin, and the pungent scent of hedge woundwort.

X

The Aura River hasn’t always been like this. The river is silting up at an astonishing pace. The change has been especially rapid over the past fifteen years.
The reason is, quite simply, excessive fertilization.
The steep fields that border the river are exceptionally good farmland. They’ve been cultivated intensively for a long time. When the soil, exhausted by decades of monocropped grain, began to tire, the problem was patched up by adding ever more fertilizer. From the clayey slopes, nutrients easily run off into the river.
Chemical fertilizers have been cheap, and animal manure readily available. That’s why farmers have been tempted to spread more nutrients than are actually needed. (Calculating the precise right amount of fertilizer would require both a scientist’s and a fortune teller’s skills: you’d have to know how many nutrients are already in the soil—and what kind of growing season lies ahead.)
The poor condition of the Aura River isn’t a new problem as such. In past decades, surplus manure was dumped straight onto the frozen river, from where the spring melt washed it downstream and into the Baltic Sea. From those carefree days stems what is now known in the Baltic as “internal loading”: over the decades, a massive amount of nutrients has accumulated on the seafloor. They originate from agriculture and forestry, industry, and wastewater.
Until the 1980s, untreated sewage from nearby towns was discharged directly into the Aura River. Human waste filled the water with coliform bacteria, and swimming in the river was definitely not recommended. The situation finally began to improve toward the end of the decade, when the riverside municipalities built wastewater treatment plants.
Over the years, other measures have also been taken to protect waterways. The use of fertilizers has been restricted several times by law, and the state has mandated that farms must leave a five-meter buffer zone along watercourses, where manure spreading is prohibited, to prevent nutrient runoff.
Thanks to environmental efforts, agricultural nutrient discharges into the Archipelago Sea are no longer increasing. On the other hand, they aren’t decreasing either, because at the same time, the number of farm animals along the Aura River has continued to grow—and so has the amount of manure.
Today, well over half of the nutrients flowing into the Baltic Sea come from agriculture.

X

In the afternoon, a rocky dam appeared ahead of us. There was no way to paddle past it. We pulled the kayaks up onto the riverbank—it was time for lunch. The smell of slurry drifting in the air did little to stimulate the appetite, but eating couldn’t be postponed forever.
So, out came the Trangia camping stove. As our meal cooked, we waited in silence, eyes drifting over the fields and the farm buildings on the opposite bank. The mud stains on our shins and clothes dried in the sun, the layer of sweat did not. Our arms ached, and in our feet and sides we could feel muscles we didn’t usually know existed.
And then there were the flies. If you sat still—and the temptation to do so is great when you are physically drained—they landed on your legs and sought out the raw patches on your skin.
We refueled on instant curry and studied the map. We had been on the move for eight hours and had made it barely four kilometers from where we started. Just a stone’s throw away, a road ran along the western bank; by bicycle, the same distance could have been covered in ten minutes.
From the direction of that road, along a small dirt track, came a dark blue pickup truck. It crossed a narrow bridge and slowed down beside us.
“Are you planning to paddle all the way to Turku?” the young driver asked cheerfully.
Not today, we said. The reply was meant to sound bright and joking: Turku was more than fifty kilometers downstream, and it was already close to three o’clock. Of course we wouldn’t paddle there today! But to the passerby, the sight of two mud- and fly-covered, weary-looking paddlers sitting amid rocks and the stench of manure—who apparently had thought they might reach the other side of the province by evening—was probably more alarming than amusing.
It had been hard going so far, we explained.
The driver looked at us and our grimy kayaks sympathetically.
“There have to be big changes in agriculture,” he said. “But things are moving in the right direction.”
We didn’t mention that we were working on a story about agriculture—or a story at all. At that moment, we were only interested in one thing: when the river would finally let us move forward a little more easily.
“It’ll get easier soon,” the man assured us.

X

In the upper reaches of the Aura River, livestock farms are larger than anywhere else in Finland. And they continue to grow fast. Ten years ago, pig farmers in Oripää had an average of 1,280 pigs; now the number is 4,700. Pig farms in Oripää are already the size of those in the most intensive regions of the Netherlands, a country known for its industrial animal production. Oripää also has the largest cattle farms in Finland and, relative to its land area, the highest number of chickens.
In the neighbouring municipality of Pöytyä, nearly a million chickens are raised. The size of poultry farms has been increasing at a staggering rate. Ten years ago, chicken farmers in Pöytyä kept an average of 23,000 birds; today, that figure is 58,000. Many small farms have gone out of business, while those that remain have expanded all the more.
Along our paddling route, we didn’t actually see any production animals. As farms grow, the animals disappear indoors—into vast pig and poultry barns.
Sometimes, though, you could sense their presence. When we saw enormous industrial buildings, we checked our location in the EU’s public database of industrial facilities and cross-referenced it with the business register: there it was—Simola’s broiler farm, with an annual turnover of 1.5 million euros. Capacity: 174,000 broilers.
And that smell of manure in the morning? It probably came from the Lehtimäki pig farm: over four thousand pigs, turnover 2.8 million euros.
In Southwest Finland, there are now nearly a hundred livestock farms classified as industrial installations under the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive.
The growth of these farms hasn’t happened by accident.
It’s partly driven by basic economic logic: more money needs to flow into the business than flows out. The rule of thumb is that big operations gain an advantage from their scale, since their expenses are proportionally smaller than those of their competitors. The same applies to agriculture.
For instance, pig farms need the same infrastructure regardless of size: slurry tanks, feeding stations, water systems, heat pumps, solar panels. More animals naturally bring new needs, but the average cost per pig goes down.
Pressure to become more efficient has also increased because farmers have very little bargaining power in the market. They’re forced to buy feed, machinery, and other supplies at prices set by manufacturers (which have gone up), and sell their products to retailers at prices set by the major chains (which haven’t risen nearly as much). The result is a survival game where only those who produce as much as possible for as little as possible can keep going.
But the expansion of farms isn’t only the result of impersonal market forces. It’s also been an explicit goal of agricultural policy.
When Finland joined the European Union in 1995, there was much debate about the future of agriculture. People worried about how Finnish farmers, operating in a colder climate, could compete on the same market as producers from Central and Southern Europe. The prevailing view was that the only way to survive was to make production more efficient, meaning bigger farms. Finland began paying small farmers to shut down their operations. Direct subsidies were channelled to those expanding instead.
That approach remains in place today. Livestock farms receive subsidies based on production volume or the number of animals. If a farm is in financial trouble, it can qualify for more subsidies by acquiring more animals. In addition, the expansion of animal farms is supported through various investment grants: in 2020, for instance, pig farms received more than ten million euros for new construction.
According to an article published this spring in the scientific journal Nature Food, over 80 percent of the EU’s agricultural subsidies—more than four billion euros each year—support the production of animal-based food.
Farm expansion is a Europe-wide trend, but it isn’t a law of nature. Austria, which joined the EU the same year as Finland, offers a revealing comparison. At the time, farms in Austria and Finland were roughly the same size. Today, an average Finnish pig farm has more than 1,400 pigs, while in Austria the average is just over a hundred.
So the EU hasn’t forced Finland’s agriculture into structural change. The EU sets the framework for how agricultural subsidies are distributed, but member states have plenty of leeway. The Austrians chose to use that flexibility to support even small farms.
Finnish policymakers, on the other hand, wanted large ones. And large farms, of course, mean large piles of manure.

X

Not long after our lunch break, we reached the point where the Pöylijoki, flowing from Yläne, joins the Aura.
The river was now wider: at best, about ten metres across. Yet we were the only ones on the water, and there were hardly any boats on the banks either.
The channel was surrounded by endless farmland: a rolling landscape straight out of a Windows 95 desktop background, except that instead of grass, it was all grain.
Here and there, a thin strip of trees bordered the river—or, after logging, a row of fresh stumps—but beyond them stretched more fields. The air smelled of manure.
At least now we were making progress, but we had a lot of catching up to do. Our first planned stop for the day had been Reppuniemi open-air museum, six kilometres from where we started. Target time: 8:30 a.m.
We passed Reppuniemi at five in the afternoon.
Our map dated back to around the turn of the millennium. Back then, the upper Aura River was still navigable and attracted plenty of recreational paddlers. Convenient bypass trails had been cleared around the rapids. The annual Aura River Paddle event once drew nearly 200 participants. It was a major summer happening for the local municipalities, complete with dockside dances, worship services, communal meals, overnight stays, and tractor rides to carry canoes past the biggest rapids. Even Pentti Arajärvi, husband of president Tarja Halonen, had once paddled among the cheerful crowd.
Now the golden age was over. The map could no longer be trusted. It told us to carry our kayaks around the rapids via bypass trails, but the trails had grown over and the docks had rotted away.
At Riihikoski, the map advised us to land before the rapids—“follow the scenic path down below the falls”—but from the steep, wooded bank we couldn’t find any landing place at all.
So we waded.
The footing was slippery, and the rapids seemed endless. Fist-sized, sharp-edged rocks rolled under our feet, and we were sure we’d twist an ankle any moment.
Then came the vertical drop. One of us stayed up top, lowering the kayaks with straps, while the other waited below to catch them. The fully loaded plastic kayaks swung wildly in the air as water splashed all around. On a footbridge above, a dog walker stopped to stare and talk on the phone. Was she, perhaps, calling an ambulance just in case?
Finally the rocky stretch ended, and ahead lay a river that actually looked like a river. Surely this part couldn’t be overgrown.
But of course it was, and badly. The map showed a shallow area, but now the whole river seemed to vanish. The overgrown stretch was the longest so far, nearly a kilometre. In the middle of the riverbed lay solid ground, thick with shrubs and field plants. Time and again the channel seemed to lead somewhere, but every path ended in a dead end.
Neither gondoliering nor wheelchair-paddling worked anymore.
We climbed into the vegetation and started walking again, the kayaks trailing behind us on their leashes.
After thirteen hours of slogging, we were still seventeen kilometres from the sauna cabin we’d rented. We decided to call it a day. The cabin owner came to fetch us by car.
We were embarrassed to shake her hand—our hands were caked with mud and river plants. So was everything else.
She covered the back seat with garbage bags, and we sat down carefully, trying not to make things worse.

X

On the second morning of our journey, the Aura River looked like a Central European garden: gurgling water, smooth round stones, irises, and colorful flowers. Suddenly, to the right, between the stones, there appeared what looked like a tiny slide. Our kayaks shot forward several meters. Yippee! The thrill of speed lasted a couple of seconds.
On the dock of a riverside sauna, a Jack Russell terrier barked furiously. The sound brought out the dog’s owner, Keijo Malmberg, who explained that his seven-year-old dog, Ave, was simply startled to see us, since paddlers had become a rare sight in recent years.
Malmberg’s house stands by the Leinakkalankoski Rapids in the municipality of Aura. He bought it as a summer place in 1997 and moved in permanently a few years later. Back then, the rapids looked entirely different: the water ran freely, and there were plenty of paddlers. Over time, however, the river began to carry in a sludge resembling a mix of peat and sand, which got stuck between the rocks. Soon willows and irises started growing there.
Malmberg began his annual summer battle against the overgrowth of Leinakkalankoski.
“I use a crowbar to pry the clumps loose and carry them onto dry land. You can get a surprising amount done in one day,” he said.
He has spent many hours clearing the rapids, yet the vegetation has continued to spread. There used to be three ways to paddle through; now only one remains, the one that passes by Malmberg’s house.
“I’ve tried to keep my stretch tidy, so it looks nice from the sauna dock.”
And indeed, by his property the water was so clear we could see the bottom of the river.
According to Malmberg, the change has been astonishingly fast and has happened only in recent years.
“Hasn’t agriculture been cleaned up a lot over the years? That’s what they’ve said, with all those buffer zones and everything. But still, the river here just keeps getting more overgrown.”

X

The rapid growth of livestock farms has placed farmers in a difficult position. When there’s simply too much manure, what should they do with it?
The EU Nitrates Directive and Finland’s new Phosphorus Decree set strict limits on how much fertilizer can be spread on a single hectare of field. The goal is to ensure that excessive nutrients aren’t applied repeatedly to the same already-fertilized plots, since they eventually wash into waterways.
But often the fields owned by a livestock farm aren’t enough to absorb all the manure produced there. Buying or renting new land is nearly impossible if none is available, because EU agricultural subsidies are paid per hectare, encouraging landowners to hold onto their fields.
For this reason, many livestock farms sell or donate their manure as fertilizer to nearby crop farms. The problem is that there often aren’t enough of those nearby: in Finland, livestock and crop production are concentrated in different regions, and it’s too costly to transport manure long distances.
In principle, Finland has a system designed to ensure that all manure finds a proper destination. Large livestock farms must always apply for an environmental permit. Authorities check that there’s enough farmland somewhere—either the farm’s own fields or a neighbor’s—to accommodate all the manure produced.
At the moment, however, no one actually monitors whether farmers handle manure as they claim in their permits.
So where does all the manure go?
“Well, the thing is… we don’t really have comprehensive data on where farmers spread it,” says Mikko Jaakkola, a senior expert at the Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment (ELY Centre) for Southwest Finland, who has long worked with agricultural water protection.
The information is striking: the ELY Centre, the authority responsible for both enforcing the law and advising farmers, doesn’t know what happens to the manure. Researchers believe that some of it is still being dumped on nearby fields in violation of the rules. Jaakkola says that may well be the case.
“Sometimes the situation is such that the slurry tank just has to be emptied. There’s no time to haul it farther away, so they just spread it on some field and write in the logbook that it was ten tons, even if it was thirty.”
There’s another crucial piece of information missing from the authorities’ reach. All farmers are required to keep records of how they fertilize their fields and how nutrient levels develop, but this data is not collected systematically.
“The farmers keep it themselves,” Jaakkola says.
Each year, subsidy inspectors make spot checks on only about two percent of farms, and they aren’t allowed to share their findings even for advisory or research purposes—not even within the ELY Centre. Jaakkola believes that should change. Authorities, he says, should know which fields are over-fertilized and which are short on nutrients, so that manure supply and demand could meet more efficiently.
“We could help farmers make deals with others who genuinely need manure. Right now those connections don’t necessarily happen on their own.”
One proposed solution is a national database compiling farmers’ fertilization records, which would help identify illegal dumpers.
“In the current situation, the ones who suffer are those farmers who actually do things properly.”
Researchers also need access to the data showing where manure is applied and where it would be useful. At present, studies have to rely on rough estimates: for example, soil nutrient content is available only as municipal averages, which makes it difficult to propose concrete corrective actions.
Statistics nevertheless show that most crop farms fertilize their fields with chemical fertilizers, the raw materials for which still come largely from Russia (fertilizers are not subject to sanctions). Most livestock manure, meanwhile, ends up on the same fields that already have more than enough nutrients.
As a result, parts of Finland now have far more nutrients than crops can absorb. Such areas include not only Southwest Finland but also Ostrobothnia, Satakunta, and Åland. In these regions, phosphorus has accumulated in the soil and is now washing into coastal waters, fueling eutrophication.

X

In Finland, the growing mountains of manure produced by livestock farms come with a very particular problem: manure also causes deforestation. Because Finnish livestock farmers are often forest owners as well, it is often cheaper for them to clear forest for new fields and spread the manure there than to look for other solutions.
In other words, forest is being cut down to create farmland whose main purpose is to serve as a dumping ground for animal waste.
Every year, 2,000–3,000 hectares of forest—about 3,500 football fields—are cleared in Finland to make way for new fields. In Southwest Finland, pig farming is the main culprit; in Ostrobothnia, it’s cattle farming. (In the case of cattle farms, the clearings aren’t just about finding land for manure spreading. The farms also typically need fields for growing feed.)
The Natural Resources Institute Finland has proposed a land-use conversion fee as a solution: if forest clearing for farmland came with a cost, deforestation might slow down. So far, the idea has gone nowhere.
Elsewhere in Europe, manure causes problems of its own. In the Baltic Sea countries, it fuels eutrophication; in Denmark, oxygen depletion caused by it has recently emptied entire bays of life. In the Netherlands and Spain, the nitrogen from industrial pig farms contaminates groundwater. In the Netherlands it is also killing trees and damaging valuable nature reserves.
Regulating animal production, however, has proved difficult everywhere industrial farming is widespread. Politicians are reluctant to anger farmers, who are already furious and calling for looser environmental rules. Large tractor protests have erupted in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Poland.
Last spring, EU agriculture ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss what could be done about the farmers’ anger. Once again, crowds of protesters arrived with their tractors. They sprayed slurry at police officers and set hay bales on fire.
The ministers decided to roll back environmental regulations for agriculture.

X

Barely into its term, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s centre-right government made a decision that will do nothing to improve the state of the Aura River or the Archipelago Sea. It decided to make permanent the so-called manure derogation. The exemption allowed farmers to fertilise their fields more heavily than the recently adopted phosphorus decree permitted, as long as the fertiliser used was animal manure rather than synthetic fertiliser. The idea was to ease the transition for livestock farmers struggling with manure surpluses as the new rules came into effect. The exemption was initially meant to apply only from 2023 to 2025.
Orpo’s government, however, made the arrangement permanent—creating an internal contradiction in its programme. The government had just pledged to reduce nutrient pollution in the Archipelago Sea, but then it allowed over-fertilisation, which is the single largest source of that very pollution.
In the government programme, the manure derogation is summed up in a single sentence: “The derogation in the phosphorus decree concerning livestock manure will be made permanent.” The line appears without context, buried among other stand-alone statements about, for example, cooperation with the fur industry. This suggests the derogation may have been added as a last-minute concession—a “late-night milking”, as Finns say—to some political group that had lobbied persistently for it.
Such things have happened in many European countries in recent years. Policymakers are now listening closely to the demands of livestock producers.
The Netherlands and Ireland have long held special exemptions allowing them to exceed the nitrogen limits set by the EU’s Nitrates Directive. Those derogations are due to expire in 2025. Farmers’ organisations in both countries have fiercely demanded extensions, and now it appears that both governments are leaning toward supporting them.
It remains to be seen whether the EU will grant an extension.
But the political winds can shift quickly. Denmark offers a case in point. It, too, once had a nitrates derogation, and its farm lobbies pushed the government to seek more time from Brussels. Public opinion changed when researchers released a video from the Baltic Sea’s Vejle Bay showing a landscape so severely eutrophicated that all marine life had vanished. This year, the last local fishermen packed up their gear—and Denmark’s government decided not to seek an extension.
Jeroen Candel, an associate professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, has studied why agriculture in particular resists effective environmental regulation. He calls it “agricultural exceptionalism”: for some reason, agriculture is not held to the same environmental standards as other industries, even though much of European farming is, in fact, industrial.
Environmental policy generally aims to apply the “polluter pays” principle. It is both fair and efficient: those who cause environmental damage should bear the cost of fixing it.
“Up to now, it has been accepted that agriculture is an exception—that it can pass the cost of environmental damage on to the taxpayer,” Candel says.
“Most other sectors are making progress in reducing emissions, but in agriculture this progress has stagnated. That’s why agriculture’s relative share in the crisis keeps growing.”
Agricultural businesses are often not even perceived as businesses but as extensions of the family, which makes regulation seem like harassment of decent, hardworking people. (You don’t often hear the same argument about regulating the chemical industry, even though there are surely plenty of nice people working there, too.)
Another reason for agriculture’s special treatment is money. We all need food, but no one wants it to be expensive. When food is produced at rock-bottom prices in industrial facilities, it inevitably carries environmental costs—and in the end, those costs are paid by everyone.

X

Manure from livestock is now causing all kinds of problems across Europe — but it doesn’t necessarily have to. If manure could be delivered in the right form to the right place, it could become a valuable raw material.
At present, European fields are fertilised mainly with synthetic fertilisers made from non-renewable natural resources. Phosphate fertilisers are produced from mined phosphate rock, and nitrogen fertilisers are conjured from natural gas.
Europe’s use of synthetic fertilisers makes it dependent on Russia. Every year, over two million tonnes of nitrogen fertilisers are imported from there. Ironically, imports from Russia have increased since the war in Ukraine began.
In other words, European countries continue to funnel money into Putin’s war economy while exposing themselves to Russia’s arbitrary price games. Yet the EU has been reluctant to raise tariffs, as that would drive up fertiliser prices — and food prices. Then there might be angry people on the streets who are not just the farmers marching with their tractors.
It is, in many ways, absurd that EU countries buy vast quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus from Russia — the very same nutrients that are already piling up as a problem in Europe’s livestock regions.
If animal manure could be recycled into marketable fertiliser, everyone would win: the environment, livestock farmers, the EU, and Ukraine.
The idea is not new. In fact, the Finnish government committed to solving the manure problem back in 2010. The plan then was that livestock farmers could sell manure, even over long distances, to crop farmers. Finland was to become a “model country for nutrient recycling”, and with the same “determined investments”, the ecological state of the Archipelago Sea was expected to reach good status by 2020.
Neither goal has been achieved. The blue-green algal mats remain a summer nuisance in the Archipelago Sea. Experts say that at the current pace, the sea will not reach a good ecological state even by 2050.
There are still numerous bottlenecks in manure recycling. Transporting manure and storing it in intermediate facilities is expensive, and someone would have to invest money in it. Funding would also be needed for product development and for building processing plants. Besides, the fertiliser trade is a huge global business built largely around synthetic fertilisers, and a shift to recycled ones would require rethinking a great many things: spreading equipment, the timing of agricultural subsidy payments, even nutrient futures trading.
Sari Luostarinen, a leading specialist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, has studied the issue for years. She says it is unclear who should make the first move. It’s a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.
“If we produce it, will there be users? And if there are users, will the product be available?”
Livestock farmers are unlikely to invest millions in storage facilities if no one builds processing plants or pays enough for their manure. Investors don’t want to fund plants for products that don’t yet have a market. Crop farmers, in turn, are hesitant to replace familiar synthetic fertilisers with a product whose availability is uncertain.
Luostarinen sees some hope in large biogas plants. One such facility is planned for Pöytyä, along the Aura River — a huge Danish-funded Wega Group plant that will turn manure into energy. There are no biogas facilities of comparable scale in Finland yet.
The idea behind a biogas plant sounds brilliant: it takes in manure and, for example, food industry waste, extracts the methane, and uses it as fuel for ships or cars.
Biogas plants also have the advantage of needing large quantities of manure and are even willing to pay for its transport. The problem today is that it isn’t economically worthwhile for livestock farms to haul manure over long distances.
However, biogas plants don’t solve the nutrient problem. The process leaves behind a slurry-like residue containing the same nutrients as the manure that went in. The residues are usually hauled back to farms, as the plants have no use for them — nor any obligation to ensure they are disposed of sensibly.
To make the residue suitable for crop farms, it would have to be refined into dry granules or pellets that are easy to store, transport and spread on fields. The state has subsidised biogas plants to encourage them to find useful ways to handle their residues, but that hasn’t been enough to unlock the situation.
“Unfortunately, the investments in nutrient recycling have been very modest,” Luostarinen says.
She repeatedly stresses that she doesn’t want to talk only about the problems. She believes that recycled fertilisers really could succeed if the market were given a chance to develop. The measures, however, would have to be several orders of magnitude more ambitious — whether that means larger subsidies or more binding legislation.
But that is difficult in the current political climate.
“If the solutions were easy, they’d have been done already.”

X

On the third day of our journey, paddling went like a dream. The river had widened into a grand thoroughfare. The destination was already in sight. Four kilometres north of Turku’s city centre, we left our kayaks on a riverside meadow by a suspension bridge over the Aura River and continued on foot through a tangle of roads. We passed junctions, megamarkets and furniture warehouses. We were heading for Lake Littoinen, once known for its lovely sandy beach and handsome villas. Then it was overtaken by blooms of blue-green algae. We were curious about it because efforts had been made there to combat eutrophication in an entirely new way.
Walking made us sweat. The air was hot, and the weather radar showed heavy rain clouds approaching from the northwest.
The sandy beach was long and almost deserted. The water was warm and, according to the readings posted on a noticeboard, clean — yet no one was swimming. Even the ice cream vendor was missing, though the website had promised one.
Lake Littoinen is a shallow, heart-shaped lake that separated from the sea about 5,600 years ago.
In 2017, a massive clean-up operation began in the heavily polluted lake. It was one of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s (Centre Party) government’s “flagship projects” and cost half a million euros. Some 160 tonnes of polyaluminium chloride were sprayed into the water. The chemical bound to phosphorus and sank it into the lakebed sediments. The underwater world of Lake Littoinen suddenly resembled the Caribbean: the water turned clear, turquoise, and swimmable overnight.
The lake’s recovery became a national media sensation. At last, some positive environmental news! In a dreamlike news video, a freediver speared a large bream. Sweden began exploring the same method for its eutrophied bays.
However, blue-green algae returned the very next summer. That showed that phosphorus was being released from the lakebed. Still, the lake remained mostly swimmable for seven years — until last spring.
This year, algae blooms began already in May, and after Midsummer the lake was a green soup again. The swimmers vanished. It was another national news story.
The turquoise Lake Littoinen had been too good to be true. To keep it swimmable, the aluminium treatment would have to be repeated again and again.
“Permanent solutions don’t come quickly — unless you asphalt the lake bottom,” Harri Helminen from the Southwest Finland ELY Centre said dryly in an interview with MTV News.
The story of Lake Littoinen is, in fact, a rather telling example of how environmental issues often cling to hope that proves unfounded.
In hindsight, it seems clear that the public, delighted by the lake’s recovery, expected something from the aluminium treatment that it was never meant to deliver. Temporary improvement in water quality did not mean that the ecological crisis had been reversed.
When a problem is hard to fix, there’s a temptation to ease the symptoms with various technological solutions. But those are often only temporary bandages — or still just ideas on paper.
We called this kind of thinking “it’ll get better soon” talk. We’d practised it ourselves, scrambling through the thickets of Pöytyä. “The river must surely look better around the next bend,” we kept telling each other, even when it wasn’t true. “Just a little further.”
The difference, though, was that we actually were moving toward the open waters downstream — there was some basis to our hope. Eutrophication, on the other hand, isn’t getting better; it’s worsing.
We are constantly told that the solution is just around the corner — and best of all, that it can be achieved without much trouble or expense. All it takes is technology, awareness campaigns, dialogue, or a functioning market for recycled fertilisers. Never mind that none of these measures has yet been proven to work — and the manure heaps keep growing. The current government’s environmental policy seems to rest on the same belief.
There is one solution that no government has proposed: reducing the number of animals.
The manure problem would shrink if Finland had fewer livestock, living in smaller units.
That would also solve several other problems. Emissions from food production would decrease, farmland now used for feed crops — often poor in biodiversity — could be returned to nature, and millions of sentient farm animals would no longer have to live in vast industrial facilities. In fact, researchers have long argued that livestock production must simply be reduced to keep environmental change from spinning out of control.
Of course, that would require political will — and a redistribution of subsidies.

X

During the final kilometres of our paddle, we passed countless pretty wooden houses whose windows opened toward the river.
The closer we got to the Baltic Sea, the more tightly people had settled along the banks of the Aura. Past the halfway point, we’d begun to see more and more piers, small cottages, saunas and rowboats.
The contrast was striking. Upstream, locals had turned their backs on the river, but somewhere along the way that relationship had shifted. Closer to the sea, the river had become a magnet — an idyll people wanted to live beside.
At Halistenkoski, a touch of melancholy set in: it was time to return our kayaks. The owner of the rental place greeted us in person and asked about our journey.
Had it really been only three days since he’d driven us up to our lodging near the river’s source?
In central Turku it felt as if the whole city had gathered along the Aura. The air carried that unmistakable late-summer-Saturday feeling: schools and offices had resumed, but warmth still lingered, and everyone was ready to go outside for any excuse that might keep summer alive a little longer.
A Red Bull -sponsored cycling event was underway — though “cycling” hardly did it justice.
Over the river stretched a hundred-metre obstacle course, and competitors in ridiculous costumes were attempting to ride tandem bikes across it. Teams went by names like the Tandem Knuckleheads, the Junkyard Princesses, and — a reference to an ongoing debate on public transport — Team Turku’s One-Hour Train.
The spectacle lasted for hours. People came and went, drifting along the water’s edge like spectators at an endless carnival.
Then came Chicken and Turkey from Naantali. They had turned their tandem bike into a bird’s nest, covering it with twigs and leaves.
They launched bravely down the ramp, hit the first bump, splashed through a shower of water, and wobbled toward a wooden shack that stood squarely in the middle of the course. The announcer called it a “drive-through sauna.”
Chicken and Turkey dove in — and, miraculously, out again.
Only the triple ramp remained. Just one more push and they’d be home free.
But then the front wheel began to stray, sliding toward the edge.
They tried to steady themselves, but the momentum was gone.
With a single, perfect comic pause — splash. Chicken and Turkey disappeared into the Aura River.

THE END

This article was supported by Journalismfund Europe and the Kone Foundation. Background reporting by Marieke Rotman.