A Technological and Ecological Tangle: Growers, Insects and Pesticides in Norwegian Horticulture, 1945–1960

The springboard for this article is a student diary from a Norwegian horticultural college in 1950. The notebook provides insights on how to use chemical insecticides, or in other words, poisons. The student kept day-to-day notes on what he was taught, and what he practised in the greenhouses and out in the fields and orchards. Alongside his fellow students in post-war Norway, he was taught to use toxic substances to ‘manage’ elements in nature. The diary is a snapshot of pesticide practices at that horticultural college from March to October 1950. After World War Two, efforts in horticulture to cultivate and control non-human nature, such as insects, intensified as new technologies such as industrial machines and different chemicals became readily available, firmly advocated and widely applied. These technologies facilitated changes on a scale previously unseen in human history. This article explores how new pesticide technologies affected the interaction between growers, plants and insects in Norwegian horticulture between 1945 and 1960. The investigation is based on the horticultural student diary from 1950 together with recently conducted oral history interviews from horticulturists who practised from the late 1940s onwards.