Returning to the roots

Arnevi Rautanen and Juha Utriainen gave up their careers to take up farming in the village of Joroinen in Eastern Finland.

Text Marika Lehto

Translation Annamari Typpö, Sedeer el-Showk Photos Anna-Katri Hänninen

It all started with high-flying dreams of an international life, but in the end their true dreams were realised in the soil of a small village in Northern Savonia.

That’s one way of summing up the journey that Arnevi Rautanen and Juha Utriainen have taken since they started their university studies in the Finnish capital region, where Rautanen studied economics and Utriainen majored in engineering. After several stints abroad, the couple find themselves in the Torstila Manor in the village of Joroinen in Eastern Finland, where they have been farming for the past six years. They grow organic oat and rapeseed on 230 hectares of land. For a family with three children, living in the countryside has been almost entirely positive.

‘The values that brought us to our new home have only grown stronger while living here,’ says Rautanen.

Nowadays, the things the couple holds dear are realised in both their work and their leisure. Twenty years ago, things were different. Back then, two young students felt a conflict brewing between their dreams and reality.

From Paris to Joroinen

Rautanen wasn’t supposed to end up in the countryside. She spent part of her childhood outside of her native Finland and dreamed of living abroad. A year in Hong Kong as an exchange student in her teens increased her interest in international issues, and she chose to major in economic geography at the Helsinki School of Economics (now part of Aalto University), focusing on Southeast Asia.

‘During the first few years, I was quite active in my studies and in student activities, living a happy student life. Towards the end of my university experience, I kept busy with a job and participated in a student exchange programme in Taiwan.’

Rautanen envisioned ‘a future fit for a business major.’ She wanted a global career – and she got one. She worked at Nissan for eight years, spending the last two in Paris. Her next step might have been Japan, but Rautanen wanted to return to Finland. She had started to question the direction her career was taking.

‘The business world was characterised by callousness, ruthless competition and materialism, which conflicted with my own values.’

Rautanen had often spent her holidays at her family’s farm in Joroinen. Her cousins lived in the Torstila Manor, which had been in the family’s possession since the 1870s. She had warm memories of playing at the farm as a child, going swimming and riding her bike to fetch fresh milk with her aunt. Rautanen found herself wanting to help at the farm.

‘One spring, I had three weeks of holiday and came to Joroinen to do farm work, but it came to nothing because it rained the whole time,’ Rautanen recalls, sitting in the main room of the manor house, built in 1894.

A high-flying first date

Beside Rautanen sits Juha Utriainen, who is also far from where he imagined his student life would take him. Utriainen studied telecommunications systems at the Helsinki University of Technology, one of Aalto’s predecessors. He was determined not to become a programmer, but the job market of the early 2000s steered him towards software engineering anyway – and it turned out that he liked it. Utriainen started working while he was still studying, but that didn’t stop him from also enjoying student life.

‘The Guild of Electrical Engineering almost carried me away,’ Utriainen says, laughing.

After graduating, Utriainen continued working at Accenture. He enjoyed living in Helsinki, but having grown up in the small country town of Orimattila, Utriainen dreamed of a life far away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

An encounter in the summer of 2014 led him to