Thursday, 4 September 2025

Celebrating 30 years of agroecology as a discipline in Finland and the career of Prof. Juha Helenius!

These days we are celebrating 30 years of agroecology as a discipline in Finland. I think we all agree that 30 years is rather a young age for a scientific discipline, and a lot has changed since Juha Helenius started his first five-year probational professorship in agroecology in 1996! The first years were tough as the new discipline fell between the silos of established fields of science and routes towards funding, and only the perseverance and inspiring nature of Juha and his closest team members paved the way to one of the most popular and productive study lines in agricultural sciences of University of Helsinki that agroecology is today. We had great honour to organise a traditional portrait of prof Helenius to be unveiled and presented to the University of Helsinki art collection on 29 August 2025!

The ceremony was opened by the follower of Juha, Prof. Johan Ekroos, and the decades-long service of Juha Helenius was warmly covered by the speech of the Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, Ritva Toivonen, who, in the end of her speech, asked stewards, AgriChar group members and agroecology researchers Mina Kiani and Jure Zrim to unveil the portrait. The portrait was ceremonially accepted by the Vice-Rector of University, Prof. Jouni Hirvonen and he also presented Juha with the highest prize University of Helsinki provides to distinguished professors,  the University of Helsinki Silver medal. Indeed, Juha has made agroecology visible both within and outside University of Helsinki, well deserved!

In the afternoon, the friends of agroecology  gathered together to the seminar of "30 years of agroecology in Finland", started with the overview by Juha Helenius himself. Perhaps one of his strongest points was the need to discuss regenerative agriculture from wider perspective, not only in terms of soil health, but also in terms of social and economic sustainability. For instance, as many of older farmers are ending their farming lifestyle, it is challenging to find new generations willing to take good care of the fields being farmed on for centuries.

 

Unveiling of the portrait of Prof. Juha Helenius and seminar to celebrate 30 y of agroecology in Finland 

In the following presentations, Dr. Irina Herzon, Dr. Priit Tammeorg and Prof. Johan Ekroos discussed their path of agroecology, shared milestones from the past and future directions of research and teaching. The following are some insights I wanted to share from my talk, about my path as a student and later researcher in agroecology. 

Firstly, it is very symbolic that we celebrate 30 y of agroecology in Finland the very week new first year students, the freshers, the youngest agroecologists currently in the academic path, have started their studies. On Monday 1st of September, the opening ceremony of the academic year was held and the rector of University of Helsinki, Prof. Sari Lindblom, welcomed the first-year students to the academic community. Welcome, our new colleagues!

And know something I was just thinking the other day here in Viikki watching the freshers happily chatting around the campus? Most of them are born in 2006-2007! Think about that, 2006 seems just around the corner for many of us, more seasoned scientists. For me, it was a historic year in the sense that I learned then, in summer 2006, first time about Prof. Juha Helenius in University of Helsinki teaching agroecology and organic farming. 

I learned this as second year BSc student of Estonian University of Life Sciences in the experimentally opened agroecology study track that, unfortunately was ceased to exist in 2009. So I was already looking around for the closest option for continuing my studies in agroecology. I was a trainee of Jukka Rajala, the pioneer of Finnish organic farming, who had just published the second edition of his organic farming handbook- while working in the oldest organic farm continuously working in Finland, where  his parents, Elvi and Aaro Rajala started farming organically in 1965 in Ypäjä. I still recollect the stories heard during early morning milking tours from Finnish war veteran Aaro Rajala, among these were the stories how they were practicing some early-day community supported farming and delivering  four times per week organic vegetables to the Helsinki! 

And very soon, in August 2008, I started as a fresh MSc student in agroecology under the supervision of Juha Helenius, Iryna Herzon, and in terms of my MSc thesis, also another legendary name in the organic farming history of Northern Europe, Jukka Kivelä- as my MSc thesis was focusing on meat and bone meal as organic fertilizer. Thank you Jukka and Juha, for the inspiration, we have been studying different organic fertilizers ever since and in many of the combinations, meat and bone meal has been one of the key components!

The amount of scientific literature on agroecology over the past 30 years globally- and as you can see, there has been skyrocketing of the literature in past ten years. In 2010, Juha Helenius invited me to continue my studies as a doctoral student in a brand new field in agroecology, the biochar science and we can today confidently say that more than half of the age of agroecology in Finland is also the age of biochar science under its umbrella. 

 During my doctoral studies, perhaps the most important bit I learned from Juha Helenius were the benefits of being open: in all his research proposals, project meetings or even courses he invited on board all the colleagues who could, even by the smallest bit, be interested in collaboration and building synergy. There were always vivid discussions as we had soil scientists, crop scientists, agroecologists, experts of economy and forestry  in our meetings of the AgriChar project and Juha encouraged always all to join either as advisory board members or project researchers. I think this photo below from my doctoral thesis defense with my opponent and all the supervisors and thesis committee members involved in my thesis illustrates nicely the interdicplinarity of my work, something I learned from Juha and have continued ever since. As you see, we have here professors and university lecturers of almost all the agricultural sciences related to biochar effects on soil, biota and plants. 

 Now, if we put biochar keyword to the same figure of nr of scientific publications,  we see that it all started also globally around 2010, but soon after the interest in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in stable form to the soils as biochar became really one of the hottest topics in the agricultural sciences in general. And Juha was the pioneer in Finland who realized the importance and the relevance of the topic right at the beginning and started the first AgriChar project in spring 2010. We then established the still-running in active monitoring, long-term biochar field experiments that are currently in the end of 16th growing season! This is something very unique globally! 

 

 These experiments have been playing crucial role for already three completed doctoral theses and dozens of MSc theses and are currently producing data to four more doctoral theses  and many more MSc theses  in our AgriChar research group! Some of these insights from the first 16 years we will be sharing next week in Sevilla, Spain during the EUROSOIL conference. Looking forward to that!

In addition to starting the AgriChar research group, Juha also gave the first spark to initiate a website of UH biochar research and what started as a small Nordic biochar blog, our  AgriChar research group website has visitors from almost all the countries in the world- there really is a lot of interest in our work with biochar and nutrient recycling. Warm thank you to Juha and all our visitors here! 

Go agroecology and biochar research in University of Helsinki!


 

 



Tuesday, 3 June 2025

Zannatul's study presented at EGU in Vienna: Effects of nutrient-loaded biochar on biological nitrogen fixation in faba beans

 

Our doctoral researcher, Zannatul Ferdous, represented our research group at the EGU General Assembly 2025 with a poster presentation titled “The effects of nutrient-loaded biochar on biological nitrogen fixation in faba beans” (link to the abstract is here). This is the first time in the boreal region that the effect of nutrient-activated biochar and fertilisers on faba beans has been investigated and we see some interesting patterns. A follow-up greenhouse pot experiment will be conducted this summer. This is a part of Zannatul’s doctoral thesis, where she is investigating how nutrient-loaded biochars affect soil biota and nitrogen use efficiency by improving retention and reducing losses in boreal soils. This project was supported by the Niemi Foundation and Maa- ja Vesitekniikan Tuki, but also Tiina and Antti Herlin foundation.



 
We are grateful to the experts who guided this project to reach the stage of disseminating Dr. Kristiina Karhu, Dr. Frederick Stoddard, and Dr. Priit Tammeorg. Additionally, thanks to fellow colleagues Samuel Amoah, Karel Bartoš, Faiza Binte Enam for their cooperation. Special thanks to the Doctoral School of the University of Helsinki for awarding a travel grant to support Zannatul’s participation in EGU 2025!

Wednesday, 30 April 2025

AgriChar team updates: welcome new PhD student Franco and other new members; research seminar of Maryam

 This spring we have numerous new team members starting and we recently also celebrated the research visit of Maryam. Maryam is a PhD student at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, and she was visiting researcher in our AgriChar research group projects since last September. During this research visit we collaborated on research on both short and long-term effects of biochars on soils, agricultural crops and nutrient recycling studies.  Furthermore, in the last part of her visit she participated in analysing the cranberry project samples for nutrient content analyses. In the research seminar, she presented us the results from her visit here but shared insights also from her PhD project on "Effects of green (Eucalyptus sp. leaves) synthesized iron oxide phyto-nanoparticles  and soil chemical factors on the behavior of Pb, Cd and Ni heavy metals in soils contaminated to total petroleum hydrocarbon  and their uptake by grasses."

Thank you for your time with us Maryam and let's stay in touch regarding future research collaboration!

We are also happy to announce the beginning of a new PhD research project of Franco, who started this spring in the international EU Horizon Ferro-project focusing on sustainable lake restoration. His research explores innovative approaches to lake remediation by integrating sediment removal with nutrient recycling for sustainable agriculture. Franco investigates how nutrient-rich sediments can be reused as phosphorus (P) fertilizer, addressing both eutrophication and the challenge of finite P resources (main supervisor Associate Prof. Olga Tammeorg). Welcome Franco on board!

 

 Furthermore, we are lucky to have several new MSc students, research assistants and interns joining us on finding out the effects nutrient-enhanced biochars have on greenhouse gas emissions from the soils as well as on the crop nutrient uptake and yield formation! Warm welcome to Sofi Paatelma, Ngoc Nguyen, Jenni Kurvonen, Tharangi Disnika and Anna Välkki! Dream team indeed to join Samuel, Zannatul and Zhouyang in our long-term biochar field experiments this growing season 2025!


 





Tuesday, 25 March 2025

City of Helsinki biochar seminar and updates from our biochar park Hiilipuisto

 Yesterday was really nice to meet up with colleagues from City of Helsinki, HSY, VTT, Aalto University and other institutions to hear updates of City of Helsinki path towards C neutrality via using biochars as constituents of growing media for grasses, meadows and trees- as well as in cleaning the stormwater. I knew there are around twenty biochar pilot sites around the city, but learned about five more sites that had no idea of so far! A lot is going on, and one really needs to try hard to catch up with everything that has been started. To my surprise, one stormwater catchment test site is even here in Viikki, and I had no idea about this, there's no information poster or stand next to it either. Thank you to Satu Talvio for inviting us all to city center for this nice seminar and let's hope the numerous pilots will also be followed up so conclusions can be made what biochar practices work and what not.

I was also happy to share updates from our follow-up project of biochar park HiiliPuisto, where all major Finnish growing media producers (BiHii, Biolan, Carbofex and Kiteen Mato ja Multa, HSY, Kekkilä and Tieluiska) came up with their best biochar-containing recipes back in 2019. After the trees were planted in 2020, as long as the watering was actively maintained, there were no much differences between the biochar and control treatments- but starting from 2022 after the watering ended, clear differences started to appear in biomass gains. As can be seen below, especially apples (Malus) and limes (Tilia) benefited from the extra moisture and macroporosity introduced by wood-made biochars, and the strongest effects were found in the treatments where biochar application rates  were highest (even up to 25% (vol).  On the contrary, in structural soils, the added biochars did not show any effects on tree growth parameters within first four years.  We're looking forward to the longer-term effects, but will publish an intermediate report soon, meanwhile please have a look at our policy brief on general principles of such C parks: (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.672468/full)! Thank you to our dream team Topi Kopakkala, Dr. Anu Riikonen, Esko Salo, Mikko Jalas, Shiromi Samiraja, Sharifa Nabavi, Camille Michel, Philibert Henniaux and Guilhem Franque! The Carbon Lane project was funded by EIT Climate-KIC and the first follow-up project of the park, Hiilipuisto, by Maiju ja Yrjö Rikalan Puutarhasäätiö.




Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Seminar of our visiting post-doc researcher Subin Kalu

Long time no see!
Past weeks we had numerous meetings, lunches and dinners to catch up with Dr. Subin Kalu, who was visiting us first time over two years. After he defended his doctoral degree in Helsinki, since 2023, he has been intensively working in North Carolina State University, USA, and doing some fascinating fundamental science about destabilization of soil carbon after saltwater intrusion in coastal agricultural soils, and as one of the articles of that field was recently published (see here), we had chances to discuss these and other insights from Subin in more detail in our research group seminar. Naturally, we progressed also the numerous articles we're currently collaborating with Subin, about biochar and lake sediment recycling research, and had chance to visit the labs and greenhouses. In the latter, MSc student groups of Department of Agricultural Sciences are currently setting up their own practical experiments on nutrient recycling, cold and hot stresses of plants. Was nice meeting up- and hopefully we'll see soon again!