Norwegian immigrant achievements lasted only a few generations

Peter Sæther from Aure in Nordmøre was a typical Norwegian emigrant.

He was 24 years old when he travelled to the USA in 1869 with his wife, Mali Sylte, and two young daughters. The girls died during the journey and were buried at sea. The couple settled in Norway Lake in Minnesota, an area with many other Norwegian immigrants.

200 years since the first emigrants left

In 2025 it will be 200 years since the first Norwegian emigrants travelled to the USA. Science Norway's reporting trip has been made possible through support from the Fritt Ord Foundation. Science Norway has full editorial freedom.

The couple were penniless when they arrived, and Peter took a job with farmers in the area. The Homestead Act gave them a jumpstart that all immigrants to the Midwest received at the time: lots of free land.

Family strength and resilience

It took time for the land to produce a healthy yield, but within a few years Sæther owned a 161 acre farm.

Grasshoppers devoured the crop two years in a row. Mould and hail damaged the crops in the years that followed. But Peter and Mali managed, through much hard work, to feed their growing family.

The immigrants ran their farms as they had at home.

“These were farms run largely with the family's own labour. Some might have had a farm boy or two,” says Christian Anton Smedshaug, CEO of AgriAnalyse.

Around 1900, 40 per cent of Americans worked in agriculture, according to the US Department of Agriculture. There were 5.7 million farms with a few animals of each kind.

Norwegians and Swedes in cooperation

Not everyone ran their own farms.

The bad years and uncertain harvests meant that farmers had to find alternative ways to earn money, says historian Karen Annexstad Humphrey.

Sam Haugdahl grew up in Trøndelag, Central Norway. In 1891, at the age of 25, he emigrated with his wife Anna Vekseth.

Haugdal attended agricultural school and learned how to produce cheese and butter at a dairy in Verdal municipality, says Humphrey.

He did not buy land like so many of his other countrymen, but worked at dairies in Minnesota. He eventually ended up at New Sweden Creamery.

This dairy was a cooperative founded and run by local Swedish and Norwegian farmers.

Won the most prestigious award

Haugdahl became the butter master. In 1900, he entered his butter in the competition for the world's most prestigious dairy award. It was presented at the World's Fair in Paris.

“The fact that Sam Haugdahl won first prize was proof of the success of Scandinavian immigrants in the Midwest,” says Humphrey.

The machines arrive

By the 1930s, farm machinery had arrived in full force both out in the fields and inside the barns. With tractors, threshers, milking machines, and automatic feeders, the farm work became easier.

“Mechanisation meant that a family could cultivate larger areas and have more animals. They started gobbling up neighbouring farms,” says Christian Anton Smedshaug.

Two factors determined which farms survived.

One was the farmer's effort and expertise.

“The families that worked a little harder, who were particularly eager, and who had the best education were the farms that grew. Maybe one son had gone to agricultural school, another was an agricultural mechanic, while the father was good at accounting,” says Smedshaug.

The conditions that nature presented them with was the other success factor. The Midwest has a flat landscape in states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota.

“It's easy to expand farms there. When tractors and equipment get bigger, it doesn't make much difference to farmers whether they run 2,000 or 10,000 acre farms. You just drop the plough and drive a kilometre farther,” says Smedshaug.

Crisis and new politics

With the help of machines, the farmers could produce much larger harvests. But their markets did not grow as quickly.

“This led to a crisis and overproduction in the 1930s. That was when modern agricultural policy emerged,” says Smedshaug.

Agriculture became regulated. Laws, support schemes, and minimum prices enabled farmers to make a living, while the right amount of agricultural goods reached the market.

Fewer people were needed to grow larger harvests. The farms specialised in one type of crop or livestock.

In 1930, there were as many farms as in 1900, but the number of people working in agriculture fell from 40 per cent to 22 per cent.

From small to large farms

Greg Wennes grew up on a farm in Spring Grove in Minnesota in the 1950s. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father owned farms just a few kilometres apart. They were related to most of the other farms in the area. Everyone knew everyone.

Many of the farmers rented out their land or sold their farms.

The development of agriculture continued with increased efficiency and ever larger yields. By 1960, the number of farms had halved.

Today, the United States has two million farms. Only two per cent of the workforce works in agriculture. The farms have tripled in size.

“I grew up on a small farm. Now the farms are 4,000, 8,000, even 12,000 acres,” says Wennes.

A brief history for immigrants

American dairy farms had an average of 100 dairy cows 25 years ago. Today they have 241 cows. Norwegian dairy farmers, by comparison, have an average of about 30 animals, according to AgriAnalyse.

“The farms are still being made more efficient. The machines continue to get bigger and there is even less ploughing. With GPS guidance and automation, the next development will be that you won’t have to sit on the tractor,” says Smedshaug.

“The development in the United States is much the same as what has happened in Norway. Here too, the number of farms is declining in favour of larger farms,” he says.

The difference is that agriculture has a shorter history in the United States.

“In Norway, people have been farming the land since the ancient Norse Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. In the United States, immigrants created something that only lasted a few generations, from the mid-19th century to the 1960s,” says Smedshaug.

The differences between small and large are growing

There are still many family-run farms.

Some of them operate on a small scale and earn their main income off the farm.

Other families have managed to raise capital to expand and renew their farming operations, and investors and companies have also invested money and are operating farms in the United States.

“Farmers are private entrepreneurs who depend on their own work effort and how they manage their money in both the United States and Norway,” says Smedshaug.

Mike Schmidt is from the small town of Spring Grove in Minnesota. He voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024.

Schmidt has many Republican friends among the farmers in the area. The majority of farmers and people in small towns in Minnesota voted for Trump.

“Farmers today are businessmen. They have huge investments and they make very tight margins. Trump has run massive businesses and has been very successful. That is way better than the politicians who went straight from university into politics,” says Schmidt, who is also a retired businessman.

Trusts that Trump will make deals or provide support

Many have questioned why farmers in the US still support Trump, despite the introduction of tariffs and the trade war that caused China to stop buying soybeans from the US.

Schmidt defends the tariff policy.

“Trump is very pro-farm business. The whole point of the tariffs is to open up markets for our products,” he says.

Smedshaug believes that farmers' support for Trump has as much to do with values as with agricultural policy.

“In practice, Democratic and Republican agricultural policy has not been that different. Farmers probably vote for the politicians they believe are closest to them culturally,” says Smedshaug.

He points out that there have been major changes in the short time since Trump became president, but that it is too early to draw conclusions.

“I think farmers trust that either Trump will make good deals, which the latest negotiation developments with China may indicate, or they will get subsidies like they did in Trump's previous term. That has pulled farmers through previous crises,” says Smedhaug.

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Translated by Ingrid P. Nuse

Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no

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