Birth of the Sleepless Land

Abstract

In this paper, I track the arrival of the sugar beet in Scandinavia and explore the technical changes, ecological implications and new social arrangements that followed in its wake. Based on ethnographic records and other historical material dealing with agricultural practices, I argue that an ethnological view that takes the agrarian landscape and the organisation of social life together as one analytical totality may be useful for addressing an important question: What are the implications in everyday life of an energy transition into—and out of—fossil-fuelled food production? The analysis demonstrates that the sugar beet arrived along with fossil fuels, steam ploughing, commercial fertiliser, migrant labour and agricultural consultants in a large infrastructural complex that significantly impacted the landscape. These material elements mirrored the historical victory of bourgeois industrial logic over peasant forms of life whose ecological cornerstone was the fallow land. Agricultural land became sleepless in the Anthropocene—and rural life became fossilised.