Novia Team
Joshua Finch
LL Co-lead, Novia Project Manager
Nina Sevelius
LL Co-lead
Jorge Gomez-Paredes
Lead of economic assessments of msAFS
Website: Novia UAS
Novia University of Applied Sciences (Novia UAS) was established in 2008 through the merger of several Swedish-language institutions in Finland. It operates primarily along the country’s west and south coasts, offering education in Swedish with a strong regional focus. Novia’s core mission is to provide professionally oriented higher education that supports working life and regional development. Its key fields include technology, business, health care, culture, and natural resources. Emphasizing practical learning, applied research, and close industry collaboration, Novia aims to promote sustainable development, innovation, and internationalization while serving the needs of Swedish-speaking communities in Finland.
Personal Mission: Novia UAS is a working life oriented and international university that supports sustainable societal development, competence supply, and public services in the Swedish language in Finland. Novia works to strengthen Finland’s ties to the Nordic cultural community and promote Nordic working life cooperation.
Project-Specific Mission: Leading the economic work package, Novia will assist farmers and other stakeholders in understanding the business trade offs of msAFS and the potential for msAFS to provide additional, profitable enterprises through ecological intensification of agriculture. Together with Norway, our participation as Finland’s Living Lab means we can contribute another Nordic voice to the question of how msAFS can be designed and function in our social, economic, and physical geographic context.
Establish a pilot successional agroforestry system based on alley cropping and relay cropping of a select number of annual and perennial crops with a further innovation aspect of combining emerging ideas from regenerative agriculture, such as tracking whether sufficient biodiversity can allow the plant-soil microbiome to acquire sufficient nutrients from soil reserves while restoring soil fertility without outside inputs to the soil.
The Agroforestry in Nyland (NylAF) is a three year development project established to primarily support farmers in investigating whether agroforestry practices could be right for them by providing structured guidance, workshops, and insight resulting in a “design brief” clearly stating the farmers’ aims for such a system and potential for establishment. We also support professional advisory services, coordinate with other agroforestry research projects, and assist in the activities of the Finnish Agroforestry Network. Finally, the project also includes the site at Lill-Nägels, whose management and evaluation is a useful, ongoing exercise in innovation as well as hands-on practice of agroforestry mimicking farm scale alley cropping.
The Finnish Agroforestry Network (Suomen puustoinen maatalous verkosto) is an informal network of farmers, researchers, policy advocates, and advisors who share a common interest in agroforestry. Through the NylAF project, we have supported the activities of the network and aim to strengthen its future outlook.