Reed harvesting grants

One objective of the project is to provide background and prepare for an agri-environment subsidies relating to the harvesting and utilisation of reeds in the coming programme period. 

For this purpose various pilot projects on winter and summer reed harvesting will be carried out as well as pilot experiments on the further utilisation of reed, in order to study e.g. the cost-effectiveness of harvesting. The introduction of grants for reed harvesting would be a significant step towards promoting enterprise in this field and developing harvesting equipment for use in water protection and ecosystem management in our coastal areas.

Many challenges in harvesting reed beds

The main challenge of harvesting reed in the coastal zone of southwestern Finland is the lack of adequate harvesting machinery. In addition, harvesting depends greatly of yearly changing weather conditions. On those winters, when there is lot of snow and/or thin ice cover, harvesting may be impossible altogether. Without the financial support the harvesting is not economically reasonable and the new harvesting machinery, that would be better suitable for Finnish conditions and for further utilization of reed as bioenergy, will not be developed or invested on.

For summer cutting of reed beds there are machinery as well as enterpreneurs already existing in Finland. The main challenge in summer harvesting is the transport of reed to the shore. In pilot experiment in the summer 2011 the work was helped by boat. Photo: Ritva Kemppanen