Paper short abstract:

Steam ploughs, artificial fertiliser and migrant labour are the historical means for the production of a land that never sleeps. The classical ethnological concept of mode of operation (driftsform) will be revisited to analyse industrial landscapes that expand in time and in space.

Paper long abstract:

Through the history of ethnology since Åke Campbell’s pioneering studies, the concept of mode of operation (driftsform) has been mobilised to analyse the relations between the practices of people and formation of certain cultural landscapes.

This paper departs from my dissertation project on the “black transition” of agriculture that accompanied the introduction of sugar beet production in Southern Scandinavia in the last decades of the 19th century. With the arrival of sugar beet cultivation, steam ploughing, artificial fertilisers and migrant labour found its way to the fields of Lolland and Scania in this period, intensifying landscapes beyond fallow.

Through empirical examples from specific Scandinavian sugar producing estates, I will explore some cultural landscapes of the plantationocene by looking at how they were produced by certain forms of practices of operation. We will begin to understand the landscapes that surround us as fossil ecologies that are born with the historical introduction of agricultural machinery and new crops. Artificial fertilisers and steam ploughs became the medicine that wrestled the land out of its ecological state of sleeplessness.

Under the fossil mode of operation, a sleepless land becomes a field of battle between migrating labour, regimes of optimisation and the planty agency of the multi-germinating seeds of the sugar beet. Today, Nordzucker is Denmark’s second largest emitter of CO2: But how did sugar production transform our landscapes into fossil modernity?