1000 years of agriculture in the Arctic

by Georg Nyegaard, museum curator, Greenland National Museum & Archives

The interior parts of the deep Southern Greenlandic fjords constitute an arctic oasis. Most of the area is low and hilly terrain with a lush vegetation, which is suitable as feed for cattle, goats and sheep. During the warmest months of the year, the mean temperature can climb to over 10° Celsius, and on the local level, the possibilities for livestock farming are as good as they are in much warmer climes.

This core area of South Greenlandic agriculture has now been placed on the Danish list of candidates nominated for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

Here, agriculture has been practiced during two chronologically distinct albeit historically connected periods. Initially, people of Scandinavian origin arrived; for a period lasting four or five hundred years, they established themselves as farmers until they were no longer able to adapt to both the climatic and the culture-historical changes that the latter part of the Middle Ages brought forth.

Recent climatic studies suggest, for example, that the weather had indeed turned colder. At the same time, there were significant commercial changes going on in Europe, where commodities other than the luxury items that could be procured from Greenland came more to be preferred by consumers.

From trappers-whalers-sealers to farmers
Later on, the sons and daughters of the Inuit culture’s highly specialized seal catchers, who were themselves influenced by the Danish-Norwegian colonization, took the great leap from being trappers-whalers-sealers to becoming farmers.

What is common to both of the aforementioned periods is that the farmers based their agriculture on mountain grazing for the livestock in the summer and simultaneously cultivated grass in the fields near the farms where they lived, which could be used as winter feed for animals.

The Norse peasants
The Norse farms in Greenland from circa 1000-1450 A.D. constituted the westernmost outpost of the Nordic peasant society during the Viking Age and of the early medieval colonization of the islands spreading across the North Atlantic.

It is hard to say just how many settlers came to the area at the beginning of this period but we can make an educated guess that the population numbered about 2-3,000 settlers at its zenith.

On the basis of their Scandinavian backgrounds, the Norse farmers forged an independent Greenlandic form of agriculture with its very own modes of operation, its very own culture of building houses and its very own kinds of tools and implements. Like their Scandinavian counterparts, the Norse farmers possessed the whole “package” of livestock – sheep, goats, cattle, horses, pigs, dogs and cats. Sheep and goats were the most important and, as contrasted with other regions within the Nordic cultural-agricultural sphere, goats were almost as numerous as sheep on many of the farms.

This reflects a local adaptation to a widespread vegetation of birch- and willow-brushwood but it is also connected to a need for making good use of the ruminants’ milk for making long-lasting dairy products. Livestock farming was supplemented with the haul from sealing expeditions and some measure of reindeer hunting. An economy that was based to such an overwhelming extent on the use of dairy products and seal meat as was the case here is something quite exceptional on the global level.

Globalized trappers-whalers-sealers
Notwithstanding the fact that the Arctic farmers were bound to make use of the local resources, they were nevertheless active across such a colossally large geographical area that it almost foreshadows the modern globalized mindset. In the summer, the farmers set out on extended trapping-whaling-sealing trips, many hundreds of kilometers away from their farms, to the north, in order to procure wares like walruses’ tusks and hides, narwhal tusks and polar bear skins, which these enterprising people could then trade for essential import commodities like iron and ship timber from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Greenlandic farmers were under the influence of their own day’s religious currents, which were circulating around in Europe. They were Catholics, with their own cathedral and their own bishop. In terms of fashion, they were also influenced by contemporary trends in European fashion. From Iceland, they brought along the rich North Atlantic poetry and storytelling tradition which contained, among other elements, accounts related to the colonization of the North Atlantic and related to Leif Ericson’s (aka Leif the Lucky) travels to Vinland.

Cultural meetings
From around 1200 A.D., Greenland came to be populated by an entirely new group of folk, the Inuit people, who constitute the Eskimoid ancestry of the present-day population of Greenland. Their culture is called the “Thule culture” and has its origins in the Bering Sea’s coastal areas, many hundreds of kilometers to the west, in the region that is presently Alaska and Northeast Siberia.

In Greenland, the Inuit people encountered other foreign cultures. Early on, they struck up acquaintances with the Northerners that were still to be found in southern Greenland and after 1721, the Inuits met the Danish-Norwegian colonists.

More recent Greenlandic agriculture
When the Norwegian merchant, Anders Olsen, retired from his position at the Royal Greenland Trade in 1782, he and his Greenlandic wife, Tuperna, settled in Igaliku in the vicinity of the ruins of the former Norse Episcopal residence, Gardar. This marked the beginning of a Greenlandic farmers’ dynasty with traditions that extend up to the present time.

The settlers built houses of stones that were removed from the medieval bishop’s courtyard and reintroduced cattle- and sheep-breeding. The village brought forth its own signature character, which is partially preserved today. Among other things, they developed a special building culture – with small and characteristically red houses made of local red-colored Igaliku sandstone.

In 1915, a sheep-breeding station was established in the South Greenlandic town of Qaqortoq, which educated young Greenlandic students to be sheep farmers. In 1924, Otto Frederiksen became the first Greenlander who took the leap into practicing sheep-farming as his full-time occupation, when he settled with his family in Qassiarsuk, which had once been the Norse settlement, Brattahlí∂, where the Northerners’ pioneer and explorer, Erik the Red, built his own estate, just over a thousand years ago.

The experiment was a success and Elizabeth and Otto Frederiksen became the progenitors of a long lineage of Greenlandic farmers. Today, Qassiarsuk is a vibrant and thriving agricultural village settlement with approximately 150 inhabitants.

Home Rule and self-sufficiency
In 1979, Greenlanders wanted to modernize the sheep-farming industry, which is one of the professional occupations that contributes to the nation’s self-sufficiency when it comes to foodstuffs, alongside the more traditional occupations – trapping, whaling, sealing and fishing. Today, out of a total of 55 farms found in Greenland as a whole, there are 43 farms located within the proposed World Heritage area.

Most of the farms consist of economic entities with modern stable facilities and possibilities for the cultivation and the storage of winter feeding stuffs.

There will continue to be new homes and stables constructed according to the build-it-yourself principle. The establishment of fields, fences, carriage roads and smaller bridges spanning the course of the river, etc., will also be carried out by the users themselves. This active participation of sheep farmers in connection with setting up the infrastructure will help to ensure and enhance the characteristic Greenlandic farmer culture.